Migration from Custom Report Layouts to Report Layouts

With Business Central 20, Microsoft introduced a new custom report layout subsystem with a new table layout, which works in parallel with the current custom layout subsystem. Eventually, Microsoft will deprecate the old custom layout subsystem and all Business Central extensions will need to be changed to use the new subsystem.

Because Microsoft knows that ForNAV is by far the biggest user of the old custom report layout subsystem, we have been in dialog with them from the start about when to switch to the new format.

The reason we have not switched already is because we have customers running the Universal Code (UC) version of ForNAV on Business Central 18 and Business Central 19, which does not support the new format.

Our plan is to switch to the new format in Spring 2023, after Business Central 22 has been released.

The means:

  • We will discontinue support for new UC report pack versions on Business Central 18 and Business Central 19. However, existing customers on these systems can continue to run their ForNAV reports without any changes.
  • The DLL version of ForNAV will keep using the old format, and it will still have the same functionality as the UC version and share the same codebase moving forward. However, we will not release new DLL versions for releases after Business Central 22.
  • The upgrade will happen in the upgrade code unit of the report pack. The upgrade will be invisible for customers and it will not incur any additional upgrade costs.