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

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. :)

When working with customizations in Dynamics AX I consider it best practice to have several installations for the same customer. At a minimum you should have a development environment, a development test environment, a test environment besides the production environment that the customer runs in daily business. DEV. The development environment is for hacking away, developing and doing research and experiments. DEV TEST. The development test environment is for testing the customizations (inhouse QA) before releasing it to the customer for test. The transfer of customizations between DEV and DEV TEST is done by exporting and importing .xpo-files. TEST. The TEST environment is where the customer makes acceptance test of customizations. The transfer of code to the TEST enviroment is preferably done by copying layer (.aod)-files from the DEV TEST to the TEST, allowing for release/build control. If successive deliveries must be done, this can be again be done by exporting importing code AS L...

I was asked by a (danish) client if Dynamics AX could format amount fields according to lanaguage code of the customer. The problem arises as the danish format for amounts is: 999.999.999,99 That is thousand separators are the dot-sign and decimal separator is the comma-sign, and the english format is 999,999,999.99 That is thousand separators are the comma-sign and decimal separator is the dot-sign. Now the Ax client is able to run in several language of course, but this also imposes the regional settings on any reports printed. Thus if you run the AX client with danish language and prints an invoice for an english customer, all amounts will be printed using danish formatting. I wrote a small class that builds a list of all real-controls in a report. You can then feed it a langauge code and it will traverse the list of controls and format them accordingly. Thus we can now batch invoice customers and get invoices printed where amounts are formatted according to the language code of the...

A feature that you often need when you work with code that is called from a form and manipulates data, is to be able to refresh the calling form to reflect the changes made, when the code has been run. This could also be a form calling an other form, where data changes are made, in the called form, but the changes must be reflected in the calling form, when the called form is closed. I have seen it done by making call back to a method on the calling form, that does the refresh. You can however make the refresh from the CALLED form or code, using an args-object. When a form calls an other form it is typically done via a menu item, and thus automatically an args object is passed to the called form. The args object can carry a tablebuffer object that is acessed with the record method on the args object. You can determine if the tablebuffer object is a formDataSource, and if so, you can instantiate a formDataSource-object on which you call the executeQuery-metod. One example could be: Form...

Working on a Dynmics AX 4.0, I learned today (from a wizard-level colleague), that overriding the tabChange-method on a tab in a form in Dynamic AX/Axapta, disallows the usersetup of the tab and all of it's children. My problem was that a customer complained that they were not able to make a user setup of the form and add fields to a tab and all tabpages below that tab on the PurchTable-form. The customization: public boolean tabChange(int fromTab) { boolean ok; ; ok = super(fromTab); if (ok) purchTable_ds.lastJournals(); return ok; } had been added to the tab. Seing that the method call PurchTable_ds.lastJournals(); was present in pageActivated-method on the tabpage TabHeaderPostings in the SYS-layer (!), I decided to remove the above customization.