Report Writer functions to access report data

Alternate reports are one approach to making third-party data available to existing reports. However, they have key limitations:

• Only one version of an alternate report can be used at a time. This prevents additions from multiple third-party applications from appearing on the same report. This situation often occurs for Purchase Order Processing and Sales Order Processing reports.
• The user may have already made extensive customizations to the main report. They would need to re-create these customizations for the alternate report.

To overcome these limitation, third-party developers can implement a technique that uses Report Writer functions to make third-party data available to all reports. A set of six Report Writer functions are included in the Dynamics dictionary for the purpose of retrieving third-party data for reports. These functions are:

• rw_TableHeaderCurrency()
• rw_TableHeaderString()
• rw_TableLineCurrency()
• rw_TableLineString()
• rw_ReportStart()
• rw_ReportEnd()

Within the Report Writer, end-users can create a calculated field that calls one of these predefined Report Writer functions, passes in the appropriate parameters to the function, and displays a piece of data from the third-party integration.

As an integration developer, it is up to you to make the data for your third-party integration available through these functions. You will do this by creating function triggers for these predefined functions. The trigger processing functions you write will retrieve the appropriate third-party data (based on the parameter values passed into the function) so the data can be used in a calculated field on the report.

The set of predefined Report Writer functions was originally designed to provide access to third-party Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Purchase Order Processing (POP) data. The functions can be used to retrieve data for any other reports, but some of the parameters for the functions won’t be used.

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