Either a business user or a Functional consultant needs to configure basic Electronic Reporting (ER) framework parameters before using the framework’s functionality. In this article, I will go through the basic ER parameters that need to be set, along with a couple of words about Configuration providers. Finally, I will briefly go through the process of importing the standard ER format configuration.

Let’s start with the parameters.

Configure ER parameters

Basic functionalities of the ER framework are controlled by the values from the parameters, ranging from the Main to the Runtime parameters. Before I continue with endless repetition of the word “parameters,” let’s dive in and see what each parameter means.

Microsoft recommends setting up document types in Document management that will be used as templates for ER reports, and for storing outputs of ER reports

I access the Electronic reporting parameters from the Electronic reporting workspace.

Screenshot of the Electronic reporting parameters form

Main parameters

General

If you review some older articles on this topic (and also the current MS Learn article 🤷), there are two flags that can be toggled:

  • Enable design mode
  • Disable tracing of ER performance in data handling

But as you can see from the last screenshot, the Enable design mode is not there. This is because the Globalization Studio feature is enabled. When Globalization Studio is enabled, Enable design mode is enabled by default and user can’t disable it, so the toggle is hidden.

The Globalization Studio feature was made mandatory on 7.5.2024.

Previously, setting Enable design mode to Yes enabled users to create their own ER configuration. Setting it to No enabled users to use Configuration service. As RCS (Regulatory Configuration Service) was deprecated on 1.8.2024, Microsoft moved to remove the toggle completely when Globalization studio was Enabled in the Feature management.

RCS was actually a separate service that allowed users to manage and maintain features such as Electronic reporting, E-invoicing, and Tax calculation services. As RCS required a separate deployment, it added unnecessary complexity to the FO solution.

Disable tracing of ER performance in data handling toggle when set to No allows Microsoft to collect telemetry information about ER performance as a specific health metric of the environment. Setting this toggle to Yes stops the collection of the telemetry information.

Attachments

In this tab, there are multiple ER parameters related to the management of documents.

Screenshot of the attachments tab in Electronic Reporting parameters

  • Configurations - specifies the storage of templates of ER formats
  • Job archive - specifies the storage of generated documents attached to the records of the ER jobs archive
  • Others - specifies the storage of generated documents used for all other purposes
  • Temporary - specifies the storage of generated documents used for other services
  • Baseline - specifies the storage of documents used as baselines during the automated testing of ER configurations

Backup storage of templates allows users to disable making backup copies of ER format configuration templates in the database. Users can also clean up the backup storage and do the back up manually.

Runtime

Currently, this tab has only one toggle, Autofit row height which ensures that the row height that is configured in Excel template as an AutoFit Row Height while containing at least one merged cell with wrap text alignment, is automatically adjusted at runtime.

The second toggle, Query timeout (seconds) will from version 10.0.46 allow users to manually configure query timeouts during runtime.

Configuration providers

You can view the Configuration provider as an author of an ER Configuration. The default ER Configuration provider is Microsoft, and it provides many ER Configurations OOTB.

When you want to do any modifications to the existing ER Configurations or create new ones, you will need to do so under the Configuration provider that is not Microsoft.

To create a new Configuration provider, you only need to specify the Name and the Internet address

As each ER Configuration that you add is owned by the ER Configuration provider, you need to create and activate the provider before adding or editing ER configurations.

ER Configuration provider is created from the Configuration provider form accessible from Electronic reporting Workspace, while activation is done by selecting Three dots > Set active on the Configuration provider tile either in Electronic reporting workspace or Localization blueprint form.

Import Standard ER Configurations

While importing a standard ER Configuration does not per-se fall into the basic ER framework configuration, I will briefly go about it here as one of prerequisites if you want to use configurations provided by Microsoft.

Find the tile named Microsoft in either the Electronic reporting workspace or the Localization blueprint form and click on Repositories.

Screenshot of Electronic Reporting Workspace

Repositories are collections of ER configurations. Repositories currently support:

  • File system
  • Operations resources
  • Dataverse

File system repository represents a list of ER configurations as XML files located where the AOS service is hosted. Operations resources repository on the other hand, represents a list of ER configurations which Microsoft provides as a part of the application. Dataverse repository represents a list of ER configurations provided by Microsoft that is located on the Dataverse as a central source of configurations.

Select Operations resources in the form and click Open from the toolbar. This action will open a form that lists all ER configurations from the repository.

In the left-hand side pane, find eFaktura (NO) configuration and select it. In the Versions fast tab, select version 1.1 and click Import in the toolbar of the fast tab. Click Yes in the pop-up window that opens and wait for the process to complete. This will download the version you have selected from the repository to your Finance & Operations instance.

Screenshot of the Configuration repository where eFaktura (NO) is selected for importing

After the process of importing completes, you will often notice in the infolog that the number of imported configurations is 2 or more. This is because other required configurations are imported automatically.

You can see which configurations are imported to your Finance & Operations instance by navigating to Reporting configurations in the Electronic reporting workspace.

Screenshot of the Reporting configurations which are imported to the environment instance

The parent of our imported configuration - Payment model is a data model which contains the data structure for the payment configurations. Payment model mapping 1611 contains the model mapping that provides information on how the data model is filled with data during runtime execution. eFaktura (NO) contains format and format mapping ER components. Format specifies the report layout while format mapping specifies how that layout is filled with data that is coming from the data source.

Conclusion

Given the complexity of the ER framework, there aren’t many configuration options in the ER parameters. Most of the options relate to the management of documents. After setting this initial configuration, users need to focus on specifying Configuration providers and ER Configurations. Microsoft provides quite a number of configurations OOTB, and anyone can take them as a starting point for their own customization.