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

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. :)