Opening RDLC Layout in Visual Studio shows <<expr>> instead of value

Question

When I open a report from Dynamics NAV 2013 in Visual Web Developer 2010, every text box shows a field that looks like

<<Expr>>

Where << and >> are the french Guillemet characters. I find this rather difficult because I have to analyze the properties of each text box, if I am looking for a particular field.

For example in this picture, how do I know which field is the Customer Name, Phone Number or VAT Registration No?

Is there any way to configure Visual Web Developer to expand the Expression like it was in Visual Studio 2008 with NAV 6.0?

Preferably I would like to either see a label instead of the generic Expr or just the old Fields!Some_random_field.Value like it was in Visual Studio 2008.

Answer 1

Ah, another feature of NAV & RDLC :)

You'll find that the Expr text appears when an expression reaches a certain "complexity" -- e.g. from just a field;

=Fields!TotalText.Value

to

=(Fields!TotalText.Value)

The fields in the header are usually always Expr as the values are passed using GetData and SetData (and remain that way from NAV 2009 reports). While this limitation was somewhat removed in NAV 2013, you can only put static values in the header -- they won't change across pages which is useless for multiple SO's or Customers for example.

There isn't a way to show it in the properties box, however the quickest way seems to be to select the field, Right Click, "Expression".

I'd suggest giving the textbox a name other than TextBox to make it easier to identify fields (e.g. "SalesHeaderNo");

Answer 2

So after a bit of research I have found another solution. There is a View Element called the Document Outline [Ctrl+Alt+T] which shows a tree like structure of the whole report. When ever you click on an item in your report, the corresponding item in the Document Outline is selected and vice versa. This is quite useful to keep a better overview over your report and to quickly navigate between the different items.

The only annoying thing is that it also shows empty text boxes, so in a sparsely populated table, you will have a lot of textbox123 items in the outline. It doesn't seem there is a way to filter these out.