How to Print Documents in Bulk with Business Central

marco ferrari
Sep 11
2 min read

Anyone who has ever had to build a report capable of printing dozens of documents in bulk—such as delivery notes or order confirmations—knows exactly what I mean: a tedious, technical, and complicated task. With RDLC layouts, this still requires nesting Tablix elements and carefully keeping them aligned to achieve the desired layout. Not to mention the maintenance effort, especially if you ever need to add an extra field to the existing ones.

However, if instead of using an RDLC layout (which Microsoft itself considers less performant) we use a Word layout, we can take advantage of the WordMergeDataItem property.

Its role is simple but very powerful: it links a report’s DataItem to a Word layout so that each record is printed on a separate page.

Let’s see how it works.

I created two identical reports, both in terms of data structure and layout. The only difference lies in the use of the WordMergeDataItem property.

The two reports are based on two DataItems: Sales Shipment Header and Sales Shipment Line, indented and linked to each other so that the result is the printout of a shipment document. The two Word layouts are identical.

While the header fields of the document were placed freely on the page, the line fields were inserted in a table linked to the Sales Shipment Line DataItem.

The difference in behavior between the two reports becomes clear when they are executed in bulk, without applying any filters to the shipments to be printed.

In the first case, with the WordMergeDataItem property set, Business Central is able to print all delivery notes, generating one for each page.
In the second case, only the very first document found is printed, and all subsequent ones are ignored.

Conclusions

As I showed in the example, printing dozens of documents in Business Central today is just a matter of a few clicks. A small feature, but one that can really make a difference in everyday work.