Business Central 2025 wave 1 (BC26): Validate report layouts for errors as an admin (Check report layout without running)

Hi, Readers.
The public preview for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 release wave 1 (BC26) is available. Learn more: Link.

I will continue to test and share some new features that I hope will be helpful.

Validate report layouts for errors as an admin:

Business value:
With the new Validate Layout action on the Report Layouts page, you can now validate report layouts to quickly identify any errors. This reduces dependency on developers and support requests, saving time and costs. It ensures accurate and reliable reports, enhancing data integrity and user confidence in the reporting process.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2025wave1/smb/dynamics365-business-central/validate-report-layouts-errors-as-admin?wt.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004336

In Business Central, a report layout controls content and format of the report, including which data fields of a report dataset appear on the report and how they’re arranged, text style, images, and more.

You can change which layout is used on a report, create new layout, or modify the existing layouts on the Report Layouts page.

We’ve talked about this page before:

With this wave (BC26), Microsoft added two new actions, Validate layout and Show layout info.

In BC25.5 and previous versions:

In previous releases, if a report layout had errors, a developer needed to analyze and possibly create a support request to understand the issue. Now, the new Validate Layout action on the Report Layouts page allows administrators to validate layouts themselves and get a list of errors if any are found. For example, I have a report where a dataitem changes after the layout has already been added. At this time, when printing the word layout, the content will not be displayed.

Choose Validate layout.

We can see the following information.

If there is no error, the following message will be displayed.

But I’m not sure if this is a standard issue, one drawback is that there is no way to check the rdlc layout for errors. For example, the following layout will prompt an error when running.

But when running Validate layout, there is no error.

However, if there is a problem when uploading the layout file, an error will be prompted directly. The RDLC layout and Word layout are the same. This is different from previous versions, which would not be verified when uploading.
RDLC layout:

Word layout:

Another Show layout info action can display basic information of the selected layout.

Test video:

Great, give it a try!!!😁

Update: What’s new: Server and database

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Hope this will help.

Thanks for reading.

ZHU