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

After using a couple of hours trying to understand why my newly created AIF-service was not doing exactly was it was supposed to do, I found the solution. My AIF service uses a new table to accept some value from an external system. When a record is introduced into this table, a new ledger journal with a ledger journal line is created, and the voucher the line gets in the journal line, is updated onto my new table. This to allow for making it possible to use customized code in an AIF service, without having to make changes to the table methods of the Generel ledger journal tables and without risking custmized code made in the Service classes being overwritten by a service wizard update of the service. I had completed and activated my service, and was testing it. Then I discovered that I had forgotten to call the code to create the ledger journal, on my new table's insert-method, therefor I got records in my table, but no ledger journal. So I quickly inserted the call to t...

Dynamics AX 2012 annoyances (for (old school) developers). Sorry about the parathesis. Having worked with Dynamics AX 2012 way back when it was called Axapta, I remember the days where the IDE had not undergone the Microsoft transition of being more Visual Studio like. And I long for some of the features I had back then. Now don't get me wrong I am all for the new possibilities the new IDE and editor gives a developer, but I wish that not all of the nice features we had in the old IDE had been removed in the new one. Keeping in mind that I will be sounding some of my customers, when they get a brand new AX installation: "That was possible in our old system!". ;0) Inspired by http://www.annoyances.org/  I decided to blog a little about the annoyances I have found working with Dynamics AX 2012's new IDE. So the annoyances I have encountered until now are: No "New form from template" in code projects The new feature that I expect is there to he...

Mental note to self: In Dynamics AX releases prior to 2012 to get the company currency you could do: CompanyInfo::find().CurrencyCode; In 2012 however you would do: Ledger::findByLegalEntity(CompanyInfo::find().RecId).AccountingCurrency

I was tasked with getting an indirect cost setup to work in project accounting 3, but encountered some problems. Having read the excellent set up guide at http://www.dynamicscare.com/blog/index.php/applying-indirect-burden-costs-to-project-ax-2012-labor-actuals/comment-page-1#comment-3324   (Thanks to Merrie Cosby for this) I proceeded to make the set up according to this guide, but failed to get it working. :( After some debugging I found that there is an error in the calculation of indirect costs when you run Dynamics AX 2012 in other languages than english. When setting up Compounding Rules the “Base amount” that you chose, is actually hardcoded in the logic that makes the calculations. The error can be found in class PSAIndirectCostCalculation method calculate: #define.BaseComponent(‘Base amount’) This could be corrected so that the define is #define.BaseComponent( “@SYS73028″ ) And the check for the BaseComponent if (_sId == #BaseComponent) is chang...

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:   ...

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...