FAQ: Why do I have two copies of every report after upgrade?

One of the top questions I’ve been getting about upgrade from 3.0 to 4.0 (both internally and externally) is: Why do I have duplicate reports after upgrade? This is actually a “feature” we came up with to work around two problems:

1. Determining which report in your deployment matches up with a new out-of-the-box report

2. Knowing whether the report in your deployment had been modified

Both of these problems are solvable, but not in a fool-proof way. So our solution was to keep all of the 3.0 reports in place, and then add in (instead of write over) the newer versions of the reports upon upgrade. Now before I go on to talk about how you can “fix” this, I want to say that we built in some logic around report publishing and upgrade so that this will work even better for CRM 5 and you won’t end up with 3 copies of every report.

How to “fix” this

The overall plan for how to get your upgraded deployment into (roughly) the same state as a fresh 4.0 deployment is pretty simple: you’ll port any changes you made to the CRM 3.0 RDLs to the new 4.0 RDLs (don’t forget sub reports), delete the 3.0 reports and then update the 4.0 reports with the proper “Display In” property which will allow your reports to show-up in the application.

Step 1: Delete the 3.0 reports

1. Start by launching the web client and navigating to the reports grid (Workplace > My Work > Reports).

2. From the View selector select the “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Reports” view.

3. Select all the reports in the grid and click the “X” delete icon in the grid toolbar. Then click “OK” on the Confirm Deletion dialog.

Step 2: Update the 4.0 reports with proper visibilities and related record types

After upgrade, all of the reports that you see in the (for example) Accounts grid or form are the 3.0 versions of the reports. Now that all of those reports have been deleted, the report icon won’t even show in these contexts, so you’ll have to match the 4.0 reports back up to the proper forms/grids to be able to run reports from these locations. The bad news: You’re going to have to update each of the 18 afflicted 4.0 reports one-by-one to do this.

This is an example of how the process will work with the Account Overview report:

1. Launch the web client and navigate to the reports grid (Workplace > My Work > Reports), if you aren’t already there.

2. Select the Account Overview row in the grid.

3. Click on the “Edit Report” button on the grid toolbar.

4. Click the “…” button at the end of the “Display In” row of the form

5. Add the “Forms for related record types” and “Lists for related record types” options to the Selected Values box and click “OK”.

6. Save the form.

Here are the rest of the reports you’ll have to update:

You could of course take the opportunity to trim down these visibilities and only display reports where you actually want them, but that decision is yours to make.

Tyler Peelen