Among the useful interactive reporting features are interactive sorting and data expand/collapse. Two standard reports that are examples of the interactive sort feature are the Customer - Top 10 List (Report 111) and the Customer - Summary Aging (Report 105). We'll take a look at Report 111 to see how NAV does it.

Since we'll open the Report in the Designer, the possibility exists that, through an unlucky combination of keystrokes, we could accidentally change this production report; the first thing we want to do is make a copy for our inspection. Open Report 111 in the C/Side Report Designer, then click on Save As to Report object 50111 with a different name, such as Customer - Top 10 ListTest. Once that is done, we can safely do almost anything we want to Report 50111 because we can simply delete the object when we are done with it.

First, let's Run Report 50111 or 111, since they will look the same. At the top of four of the report columns, we will see an up/down arrowhead icon representing an interactive sort control, which is highlighted in the following screenshot:

Now open test report 50111 in the Report Designer, then View | Layout for Visual Studio review. Highlight the BalanceLCY_CustomerCaption textbox, as shown in the following screenshot. Show the properties; choose the Interactive Sorting tab. As we can see here, interactive sort options are set for this column to sort the detail by the value of BalanceLCY_Customer. If we look at the properties of the other three columns that have interactive sorting enabled, we will see similar setups to those shown in the following screenshot: