Sage Accpac Intelligence; Beyond Report Manager, Part 2
Posted by Plus Consultants on Fri, Sep 17, 2010 @ 12:58 PM
by Leon Colton, leon@plus.ca
This is the second article of the SAI series, and it is more technical in nature.
So, let’s go back to our Payables consolidation scenario. To start a new report we will need to add a new container (unless you have an existing one that you can use to base the new report upon). Provided you have a licence, the first place to go to is Connector, to do two things:
- To establish connection to the database
- To define a Container (tables to draw data from)
SAI can work with any database engines via ODBC connections, here we will only consider MS SQL. From Sage Accpac Program menu click Sage Accpac Intelligence. Upon logging in to the company database the following dialog box will open up:
Click ‘Connector’ and proceed to the next screen:
Each database engine has its own driver, so select ‘ODBC Driver SQL Server’ and double-click the icon. It will expand in all containers that were created so far:
Right-click on the icon and select ‘Add connection’. There are a few types of Connection you can pick from, let’s explore the most visual one – ‘Graphical Join’. Similar to Crystal Reports a few tables can be joined in a graphical way to form up the container, so select these two tables: APOBL and APVEN and join them graphically by Vendor ID:
We’re one third thru in our goal to build an SAI report, and in the next article of the SAI series we will explore how to select data from the Container we’ve just built.