It's been a while since I last made a post and there are a few reasons. Bejweled Blitz on the iPhone is a big part, but also, it seems that there has been a real period of consolidation for me just recently: taking a lot of the things I learnt and applying them on projects, so not a lot of new stuff to share, just lots of time-consuming work. That's the excuses for not blogging out of the way, now on with the post.

I came across a top tip yesterday courtesy of a work colleague and felt it was simply too good not to share. If you do any report development in NAV 2009, keep reading.

One of the mysteries of working reports in NAV 2009 is understanding what is in the dataset when the reporting services client renders the report. In NAV 2009 we had the undocumented Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F12 key press which you could use when previewing the report. This key press opens a window with a list containing the entire dataset, allowing you to copy and paste into Excel. This is great for figuring out how you should be sorting and grouping your dataset for the required results.

Then when SP1 for NAV 2009 came out we got the Ctrl+Alt+F1 (About This Report) key press that could be used to do the same, but for reasons that I can only assume are related to the way data is paged on the client, the first time you select the option after previewing the report you get told you need to run the report again and select the About This Report option again. This need to repeat your actions in order to get your goal is mildly annoying. This is where the top tip comes in. When your options page for the report is displayed, select Ctrl+Alt+F1, About This Page. Now when you preview the report you can press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and see the full dataset and you don’t need to run the report again. It's not perfect but better than having to run the report twice.

So what would be a better way of doing this? I would suggest a setting in the config file that says keep dataset for reports. This way, developers could have this setting on and end users could leave it switched off.