I got this question from my friend and fellow MR consultant recently
“Is there a way in Management Reporter to print a list of report definitions or download to excel or copy/paste to excel? I could create an SRS report, but I haven’t looked at the SQL tables yet.”
Bottom line—no need to monkey with SQL tables.
Here’s what I came up with:
- Anywhere in MR, do a Control-O or click the Open icon (love this!)
- This opens the Open dialog box to the Report Definitions tab
- Highlight all Report Definitions using Shift-Click
- Control-C to Copy
- Paste into Excel
You can do this on the other tabs as well in order to list the rows, columns and trees.
If there’s one takeaway from this that might be even better than creating lists in Excel, it’s Control-O (that’s a letter, not a zero).
It’s an underutilized FRx-style interface to the MR building blocks.
If you scroll right, you can see lots of information on the report definitions: the date generated and by whom, and the date modified and by whom. Great information when you’re doing some cleanup.
Cheers! Jan
PS. Control-O is the shortcut for File>Open.
You just saved me another 2 hours today!
Thanks!
Les
LMAO!!!
Are there any SQL tables that store the last run date of an FRx report? The solution provided above works great for a single company, but we have multiple companies we’re preparing a migration to Management Reporter for and we’re wondering if there is a SQL table holding the same FRx data. We’re interested in the report name, who ran it last, and the date it was last run. Thank you in advance.
FRx info lives in an access database. Hack it and you can figure it out. My whitepaper on FRx replacement has details but it isn’t free. You may be able to google it and go from there. Good luck…Jan
As I suspected, just needed to get it in writing…maybe now they’ll believe me ;-D.
Thanks for the quick reply.
When a user makes changes to rows/columns/trees, etc. what file gets updated? I understand the concept of TDBX files but my client is asking what directory they should be backing up to protect their work to date. Back in the FRX days, we would recommend the sysdata directory being backed up, but I am not positive on the MR side now… We created a new building block (separate from the default that comes from MR) and assigned that to their company. Thanks in advance for your input.
Hi Louise…great question and glad you asked because backups are so critically important. The building blocks are all stored in the SQL Server database, so that’s what should get backed up…although I’m not IT-esque enough to tell you how to find it. But here’s someone else’s post that discusses backup; it’s written for GP but the theory applies to SL and AX as well. I’m also not sure how the data mart sql server database factors in, but it’s something to consider. I also like exporting all the building blocks as you mentioned re the .tdbx file (Company > Building Block Groups > Export), but only in addition to a database backup. Hope this gives you a starting point. Cheers…Jan