Retail POS report

With the introduction of Mpos, Microsoft has introduced a new report framework to show small, light weight report directly from retail channel database. These reports are available for both Epos and Mpos.

The best part of these reports is that they are just XML report definitions, that query the database for specific columns or stored procedure. These report definitions are located in the Retail -> Setup -> Channel report configuration.

The channel report configuration consists of report id, description, permission group and report definition xml. Report definition xml has 3 sections: dataset, parameters and reportcharts. Dataset section defines the data source type and query. Parameters section consists of query parameters. Finally reportcharts section contains X and Y coordinate parameters for bar charts.

The next thing is how to customize these reports or create a new one. Let me take an example where I will show how to put upload session data as a report. For this l create new report with report id (200). I have named it as “Upload session” and given permission group of “Cashier” and “Manager”. For xml definition, I have written a select query from “[crt].[uploadsession]” table. You can use query or stored procedure to achieve this.

There is also need of declaring localize report content which is used for language translations of the labels used in reports based on localization. Here I have used “en-us” for my localization.

To have new report available in pos, I need to run the global configuration job to send data to channels. Now lets check in report section of Epos and Mpos, and open it.

And I have my report ready with the upload session data. I have put three filters, start date, end date and no of records. Similarly we can have bar chart representation of this data. Let me change the select query with stored procedure.

There are few differences in the way of presentation of report in Epos and Mpos. In Epos we have column filters, view and save features which are not present in Mpos.

Finally I can only say that, these report are not for advanced reporting. Its basically running a sql query. If you can write sql query for your requirement, you can build your Epos and Mpos report.