Using External Reports and Mail Merge Templates

Now that the reporting in Martial Class™ since version 3.3 has been made highly customisable by you (the end user), it is possible for you to continue to make use of your legacy application reports once you upgrade to Martial Class™.

To do this, you need to:

1.

create a new report in Martial Class™

2.

set the selection criteria to select the information you are interested in retrieving for the report

3.

select the fields you need to populate your old report or mail merge document (if you know the column titles that your legacy reports are expecting, you can also rename columns here to aid the integration).

4.

select your old report (from your legacy application directory) as the report formatting file.

Importing a legacy report in this way will copy it to the reports subdirectory in the Martial Class™ program directory.

If it's a Crystal report, you will need to open the copied report in Crystal to select the new design database and possibly resolve any non-automatically mapping fields (see Editing a Crystal Report for more information).

Then run a test report to ensure it all works.

This allows you to make use of reports you are accustomed to using, and those you may have invested considerable effort into to customise for your business.

You can also export converted reports and send to others in your organisation, to save everyone having to go through this conversion.