How to easily customize documents sent from Business Central? - part 2

Use Case:

Creating and setting up document templates can be time-consuming and expensive. When your company first implemented Business Central, the setup was tailored to your needs, but things change over time. Wouldn’t it be great if you could update these templates on your own?

That’s where this three-part series comes in. Each part covers a different aspect of report configuration. In this second part, we’ll focus on the document lines.

Let’s dive in and see how you can make these changes easily!

HowTo: Add information to the Lines of a Report

Firstly, let’s have a look at what part of a document is meant by the Lines. For example, we will have a look at the current Lines in a Sales Quote.

Follow steps 2 to 4 from the previous part, to see how the Report would be printed with the current document template for Sales Quotes.

The part shown below are the Lines.

As you can see, there is already quite a bit of information shown. Let’s see how we can add information to this.

Close the document and go to Timber Reports.

Select the Line of the report you would like to customize, e.g. Sales – Quote, and click on Edit in the top menu.

The Timber Report Header Setup opens. In the Lines FastTab, you find all additional information that is set up for the Lines, which is nothing for now, see below.

To show additional information per Sales Line on the Sales Quote, simply add a new line by clicking on Lines and New, see below.

In the Timber Report Line Caption window that opens you can set up the additional information shown in the Sales Lines. Let’s go over two examples to look at the possibilities.

Firstly, we add the weight of an Item as additional information. As the weight is different for each Item, you create a Placeholder in the Placeholder section. Fill the columns as follows:

Placeholder Id	Placeholder Type	Placeholder Table Name	Placeholder Field Name	Text Format String	Hide if Placeholder is empty
1	Table Field	Sales Line	Net Weight	DEC0	☑️

Now that the Placeholder has been created, use it in the Text field under the General FastTab by putting a % before the Placeholder Id. In this example, we fill the Text field with ‘Weight %1 kg’.

In the Applies to Type field you can select for which kind of Lines this additional information will be shown. As the weight is only relevant for Items we select All Items.

Extra tip: By choosing Item Category, Item No., Resource Group or Resource in this field, you can edit the field Applies to Code to select a specific one. This additional information will then only be shown for that code.

In the General FastTab you can also customize how the text is printed with the Bold, Italic and Underlined toggles. To see the finished setup, see below.

Extra tip: Do you want to show this Line in other reports? Click on Copy to in the top menu, select the report to which you want to add the Line and click OK to easily copy it to that report.

In this second example, we want to add an additional line with the botanic name and tariff number of an Item for export sales. As those are, again, different for each Item, we create two Placeholders in the Placeholder section.

Placeholder Id	Placeholder Type	Placeholder Value	Placeholder Table Name	Placeholder Field Name	Relation Table Name	Relation Field Name
1	Special Value	Botanic Name
2	Table Field		Sales Line	No.	Item	Tariff No.

Now that we have created these Placeholders, fill the Text field with ‘Botanic Name: %1 – Tariff no.: %2’ and the Applies to Type field with All Items.

We create a third Placeholder, to set up a condition to only show this line when we are exporting goods. For this Placeholder, we fill out:

Placeholder Id	Placeholder Type	Placeholder Table Name	Placeholder Field Name	Relation Table Name	Relation Field Name
3	Table Field	Sales Line	Document No.	Sales Header	Sell-to Country/ Region Code

To make sure this additional information is only shown for export sales, click on Conditions in the top menu.

In the Timber Report Line Conditions window that opens, select:

Placeholder in the Condition Type column.
3 in the Placeholder Id column as this is the third Placeholder we created.
<>UK in the Filter column to only show the additional information when the Sell-to Country/Region Code is not UK.

When you now close the Timber Report Line Conditions window and the Timber Report Line Caption window, a notification pops up, click Yes to close it. The notice refers that the Placeholder Id 3 is not used in the text, which is intended in this case.
To see what the changes look like, open a new preview of the specific document.

Conclusion

While you can only change one document template at a time, there is a lot of flexibility on what additional information you want to show on the Lines of each Report. Have fun discovering all the possibilities!

To find out more customization possibilities, have a look at the other parts of this series: