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

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

Mental note to self: Ways of programmatically opening a browser with a webpage in x++: infolog.urllookup('http://www.fasor.dk'); This will open the standard browser. Or WinAPI::shellExecute('iexplore.exe','http://www.fasor.dk'); This specifically opens internetexplorer. The last method can also be used for starting up 3rd party applications from Axapta.

A quick way of of dumping table records into a xml-file is to use the kernel method xml, which is present on all instances of a tablebuffer. However, the xml produced by this method is NOT well-formed. Three problems exists: No header info for the xml-document is written No root node is written The data within tags are not html escaped When the xml-method is called a call to the GLOBAL class method XMLString method is made. With a little adjustment to this method we can make the XML data output wellformed. But first you must add this method to the GLOBAL class: public static str escapeHTMLChars(str _in) {     int x;     str out;     for(x=1;x<=strlen(_in);x++)     {         if ((char2num(_in,x) < 32) && (char2num(_in,x) > 126))         {             out += '&#'+num2str(char2num(_in,x),0,0,0,0)+';';         }         else         {             out += substr(_in,x,1);         }     }     return out; } And now back to the global::XMLString m

A quick None AX-related post regarding strange software behaviour. I was booking my wifes work in my calendar. She works nights right now at a hospital, and I needed this in my calendar, to be able to plan in project work for my studies. She works night shifts 7 days in a row starting tuesday evening ending monday morning the following week, and this every second week. I tried to book this using reoccurence, and got an extreme amount of hours. WTF? :0)

Ever wonder what the AliasFor property on a table field is used for ? It is actually a pretty nifty little feature of the AX runtime. I was tasked with making a solution for the following problem: * Introduce a new field on the item table that can hold the EAN number of the item. * Enable the user to be able to type in either the item id OR the EAN number when searching for an item to put on e.g. a sales order line. * Make sure that the EAN number is shown in the look up lists This actually quite easy to do. First I created the EAN number field on the InventTable using a new extended datatype created for that purpose. Then I created a new index on the InventTable containing the new field. This of course makes for searching for EAN numbers effeciently, but it also makes the EAN number field appear in the lookup list. The final thing to do was to set the AliasFor property of the new EAN Number field to be an alias for ItemId, by assigning the value ItemId to the property. Now "magic

Try the following job in Dynamics AX: static void Job16(Args _args) {; info(conPeek(new HeapCheck().createAContainer(), 4)); } I've tested it in Dynamics AX 2009 and Axapta 3.0, so I guess it would work in Dynamics AX 4.0 also. Translated from danish the result reads: "Hi mum, heres comes a buffer" An AX easter egg. :) 2012.11.07 - Update: Just tried the same "fun" job in Dynamics AX 2012. It seems that the good people at Microsoft have been reviewing some of the old kernal functions, as the result of running the above mentioned is now: "buffer buffer buffer buffer". 2023.08.30 - Update: "buffer buffer buffer buffer" is still the boring result in D365. :)