Dynamics 365 FO / AX - thoughts on application development and customizations

With the advent of model management in Dynamics AX 2012, Microsoft has gotten rid of the ax .aod files which in previous versions of DAX constituted the layers. In DAX 2012 adjustments for the meta data model and code are stored in the modelstore in the database. In previous version deleting a layer containing adjustments to the standard application consisted of delete the ax .aod file and synchronizing and compiling. How is this done in DAX 2012 ? The answer is a command-line tool called AxUtil. To delete e.g. the usr-layer in the application do the following: 1) Shut down all AOS-servers but one (applicable only if you have more than one AOS running). 2) Go to command line interface on the server where the last AOS is running. 3) Go to the folder where DAX's management utilities are placed, e.g.     C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics AX\60\ManagementUtilities 4) Run the Axutil like this:     Axutil delete /layer: /db:     To delete the usr-layer in the MicrosoftDyn

I just helped a colleague fix a little problem in Dynamics AX 2012. He was going through a tutorial to make a (SSRS) report in Dynamics AX 2012. He had designed the report complete with a dataset getting SalesTable data from AX, and had deployed it to the Report Server. He had also made a menu item for the report and put that in the menu in AX. However when he clicked the menu item AX failed to run the report giving the error "Report has no design." We poked around using a breakpoint in the Info class, to find that the AX class failing was ReportRun. The method in ReportRun we ended up in expected to receive a designname. However as nearly all AX reports are gone and replaced with SSRS reports in Dynamics AX 2012, this lead me to believe that something was up with the menuitem. We examined the output menu item to find that the ObjectType property was set to "Report" which is a remnant of the old AX reporting system. We corrected this property to SSRSReport,

Today I found a little hack that is useful. I have a (super) class extending RunBaseBatch. This class build a query on the fly. This class also implements a dialog, which of course have a select button, so you can input search ranges for the query the class uses. I have a second (sub) class extending the first (super) class. Of course the sub-class also uses a query object. The problem was that when the super class and the sub class instatiates a query on the fly the query is nameless, and therefor execution of the dialog for the query ranges, resulted in the savelast values for the query to become messed up, so that when you ran the sub-class you would get the query ranges from the super-class and vice versa. A simple solution exists to this problem: When you instatiate the query object in the and then the queryRun object, you can do: queryRun.name(this.name()); giving the queryRun object the name of the object instatiated using the super- or subclass. This seems to k

Editor-demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4nnnf9WJjU Report-programming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXcQmGo6aOg

The following snippet can be used (in a form) to programmatically toggle mandatory mode on a dimension field (in this case department). ledgerJournalTrans_DS.object(fieldId2Ext(fieldNum(LedgerJournalTrans, Dimension ),1)).mandatory(true);

A classic problem with ERP-systems running in multinational enterprises is the formatting of amount fields in a report. One aspect of this is that the different currencies in which the different national companies of an enterprise operates can vary a lot with regards to number of digits in the amount. E.g. the exchange rate between a danish kroner and an indonesian rupiah is (at time of writing): 1 DKK - 1524,75 IDR. This would for an amount of 1 million danish kroner yield an converted amount of 1,524,750,000.75 IDR. An amount of the size can result in the Dynamics AX core returning Today I was asked by a customer, to come up with a prototype for user enabling the setting of widths of fields on a report The class that formats Real fields can be found here: http://www.fasor.dk/blogspotattachments/Class_ReportFieldControlFormatter.xpo

CASE: In the project module you can create item requirements for a project (which are basically items you sell via the project). At a customer site, a customized table and form, has been added to the item requirements forms, so the customer is able to set up item specifications for each item requirement, consisting of records with different kinds of data which describes the item. A class bas been made to import a .csv-file to an set of intermediate tables where data which forms the basis of item requirements and item specifications are stored. On the item requirements form, you can call a form showing the contents of the intermediate tables and from this form you can then (via a menuitem button) call a class that facilitates population of the item requirements AND item specifications from the itermediate table. When populating the item requirements table based on the intermediate table, you deleted the contents of the intermediate table. So you have the Project form calling th