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Qucamba Reports Prerequisites

Table of Content

  1. System Environment
  2. Dynamics NAV Installation
  3. Client Access
  4. Database Access
  5. Design Tools
  6. Conclusion

There are some basic requirements that you should make sure to fulfill before you're going to start with Qucamba Reports.


System Environment

Qucamba Reports is a Windows Desktop application. Thus, you should have Windows 10 or higher installed. Qucamba Reports can run in 64-bit mode as well as in 32-bit mode. The mode is selected automatically.

Qucamba Reports should always be installed locally and requires free disk space of typically about 1GB. Please note, that this disk space is not required during installation but might get allocated during operation.

Your CPU should be at least a standard CPU that is usual for today's PCs. The faster your CPU works and the more cores it supports the faster your operations in Qucamba Reports will work. This is especially because Qucamba Reports makes extensive use of parallel processing.

Qucamba Reports also supports high-resolution displays natively.

In order to install Qucamba Reports you need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 installed.

Furthermore, internet connectivity is required in order to contact the download and licensing service on qucamba.com. Please note that proxy authentication is not supported.

Qucamba uses https for communicating and all qucamba services use standard port 443 for secure connections over SSL so that there should be no special attention needed concerning your firewall during installation. However, when running Qucamba Reports you need to configure the firewall of your database server machine to pass requests to the SQL Server instance used by your Dynamics NAV installation. For more information on firewall configuration see the dedicated section below.


First of all you should have a running Microsoft Dynamics NAV (NAV) installation. Qucamba Reports works with NAV versions up from NAV2015. Please make sure that you have execution rights on your local machine as it is required for executing Dynamics NAV Powershell cmdlets. Your NAV license should contain report development rights in order to use the full range of functionality of Qucamba Reports and the license needs to be installed on the Navision Service Tier (NST). The C/SIDE language must be set to ENU at least during operation of Qucamba Reports.

 

Client Access

In order to communicate with Dynamics NAV, Qucamba Reports requires access to a local installation of the Dynamics NAV Windows Client (aka "Role Tailored Client"). The client version must exactly match the service tier (NST) and database versions. The C/SIDE client must be contained in this directory as well and as mentioned above, its language must be set to ENU.

Running Qucamba Reports with different Dynamics NAV versions and without installing the client

If for some reason you don't want to install the Windows client locally, you can also use a copy of the Role Tailored Client directory. You can then switch between different client versions by referencing the client directories in different profiles.

Though this scenario is not supported by Qucamba, we created a short guide for you on how to accomplish this. But you'll have to get this running on your own.

 

Database Access

You need to have direct access to the Role Tailored Client installation files as well as to the NAV Service Tier (NST) and the Microsoft SQL Server that is being used by this NAV installation.

Direct access to the SQL Server means that

  • either you need to participate within the same Active Directory domain
  • or you should have at least full access rights to the NAV database on SQL Server as a database user.

To create a direct database user on SQL Server, use the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Please ensure that you

  • have a registered user on SQL Server
  • the server is configured to accept Windows as well as SQL User connections
  • you granted full access rights to the NAV database
  • your firewall allows access on all required ports such as TCP #1433 or in case that you changed the default SQL instance port no. the respective instance port no.

Required or recommended ports to allow on the SQL Server machine
Protocol Port No. Mandatory? Purpose
tcp 1433 YES SQL Server standard port; if changed e.g. for multiple instances replace it by the port no. used by your SQL Server instance
tcp 445 YES Microsoft Active Directory
udp 1434 Recommended SQL Server Browser; this makes the creation of profiles easier
icmp 8 Recommended Echo (ping); this is to detect if a profile could be activated potentially

 

When connecting to a Microsoft Azure instance, please ensure that the required ports are enabled in the management console as well.


Design Tools

Beside the NAV installation you're also going to need a layout design tool such as Microsoft SQL Report Builder (contained in SSRS) or the Visual Studio RDLC editor. Qucamba Reports is capable of handling both, Report Builder and Visual Studio.

Which design tool you're going to use depends on your personal preferences but also on some technical features. The following table should give you some help in deciding which tool to use.

Design Tool Pros Cons
Microsoft Visual Studio RDLC-Editor
  • Feature-rich and well-known by developers
  • Document Outline view available
  • Changes to the layout file are recognized and can be reloaded without closing the editor
  • Layout can be pre-compiled to check for errors
  • Controls can be found by name 
  • Heavy application and therefore slow loading of layout files
  • Expensive if not already licensed
  • More difficult to learn for non-developers due to functionality not related to RDLC at all
Microsoft Report Builder as contained in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
  • Nice application with a look & feel comparable to Microsoft Office
  • Functionality is reduced to reporting purposes (but still contains things that do not work in conjunction with Dynamics NAV)
  • Launches layout files much faster than Visual Studio does
  • License usually already available through SQL Server
  • No Document Outline view available
  • Doesn't recognize changes to the underlying layout file which may result in loss of design changes if not handled correctly
  • Only capable of handling .rdl files but not .rdlc files. However, .rdlc files can be renamed to .rdl in order to design them with Report Builder. 
  • No pre-compilation
  • No selection of controls by name

Please note that both of these tools use different file extensions. While Visual Studio RDLC-editor uses .rdlc Report Builder uses .rdl. Thus, you allways have to re-open layout files when changing to the other design tool.


Conclusion

The requirements for a Qucamba Reports installation aren't considerably different from a common Dynamics NAV installation. However, you should carefully inspect the details mentioned in this guide to methodically analyze your installation when something doesn't work as expected.

Also, you're adviced to read the Qucamba Reports Software License Agreement (SLA) as well.