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

A customer had a requirement for setting a week number for approximate delivery of purchased goods on shipment as an indication for the sales department of when the goods will be arriving. An integer field had been introduced on the table in question, and the customer wanted to be able to do a lookup in the standard calendar, but wanted a week number to be returned in stead of a date. I solved it like this: 1. For the field that was to contain ETAWeek there was an Extended Data Type called ETAWeek. On the EDT I put SysDateLookup in the FormHelp property 2. In the Form SysDateLookup I added a boolean variable in Classdeclaration. boolean calledFromIntegerField; 3. In the Form SysDateLookup - method init I added check to see if the SysDateLookup form was called from an integer form control. if (formRun.selectedControl() is FormIntControl)      calledFromIntegerField = true; 4.In the Form SysDateLookup - method closeSelect I added an...

Today I had some trouble getting a normally simple thing to work in an AX form. The form consists of to synchronized grids, and the user wanted an "Export to Excel" command button, so the active grid can be exported to Excel. Normally this is very simple as you just need to add a command button to the form in the ActionPane somewhere and you're home free. Not this time. It didn't work. I googled and found this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/emeadaxsupport/archive/2009/09/07/how-does-the-export-to-excel-feature-work-under-the-hood.aspx and put a breakpoint in the performPushAndFormatting  method. I didn't reach my breakpoint and Excel didn't even start. Then I started to investigate the form. Maybe the tables of the datasources of the form had some obscure property that needed tweaking, but no. After pondering this for a while I found that the designer of the form had dropped a field group containing all the fields in the grid. Could that be the pro...

A classical developer challenge in Dynamics AX is to enable a form button when multiple records have been selected in the form by the user. This usually involves writing some form of loop (for or while or do-while) that starts out with calling _ds.getFirst() and continuing the loop as long as _ds.getNext() returns a tablebuffer. Well things got a little bit easier in AX 2012. In AX 2012 you can use the MultiSelectionHelper class. One example is the following that I encountered in AX 2012: Can you make the customer collection letter print out run for each selected collection record in the Print/Post collection letters form (Accounts receiveable / Periodic / Collections / Print/Post Collection letters). If we ignore the possibility for setting up print destination for running each report we can do this in two steps: 1) Change the "Multiselect" property of the "MenuButton" and the "Menuitembutton" in the MenuButton in the form from "Auto...

Valid Time State tables are new i AX 2012 a gives the developer the possibility to easily create tables that hold e.g. current setup data for various purposes, and at the same time keeping a "history" of the changes of the data in the table. For more reading: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg861781.aspx I was tasked with doing a setup table with rates for calculating Vendor Bonus and I chose to base this a valid time state table. The customer asked for a button on the form, where you maintain the vendor bonus calculation setup data, so you could toggle viewing "Current setup" or "All setup" records (changing the view from actual to all records and vice versa in the form). I found that you can not change the ValidTimeStateAutoQuery property on the form data source in a form at run-time. It simply does not change anything, so I came up with the following solution: A boolean class member in the classdeclation method of the form: boolean ...

Being in a situation where I needed to determine if a certain AOT-element was included in an installed model, I wonder why Microsoft didn't link the form showing installed models (Help / About Microsoft Dynamics AX / (link) Show installed models) or (Tools / Model management / Models installed) with the form showing Elements in installed models (Tools / Model management / Model elements. Opening the About Dynamics AX form you are able to access the list of installed models in the application, but you can not drill down to the elements included in the model. You'll have to go to the other form and make a filter to view the elements in a model. So I quickly made the attached code project, which simply adds a button (Elements) to the Installed models form, so that you can see a list of the elements included in the model. In the element list you can open the cross reference for each element, to make further drill down as to which elements are using the element included in th...

In Dynamics AX 2012 if General Ledger module is setup to validate Check sales tax by entering either "Warning" or "Error" in the "Check sales tax groups" field, then Dynamics AX will throw an error (stop execution) or issue a warning in the infolog if it encounters a tax setup error when doing calculation of tax. The error looks like this: As you might know the tax calculation is based on getting the intersecting tax codes connected to the item tax group and the tax group of a given source document line. In this case I encountered we wanted to diagnose the origins of the error, because the error occurred when changing a customer group, which we thought was a bit odd. Digging a bit deeper, the error was not related to changing the customer group, but instead related to the following recalculation of credit limit on the customer that Dynamics AX wanted to perform. I traced the error to the class Tax and the method insertInterSection. Seing...

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/axtools/archive/2013/11/04/parallel-x-compilation-for-microsoft-dynamics-ax2012-r2-in-cumulative-update-7.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/axtools/archive/2013/04/30/ax2012-r2-hotfix-available-improves-compile-speed.aspx http://daxmusings.codecrib.com/2013/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-15-minute.html