Experts Exchange

Since a few weeks, I’m member of the experts exchange forum and I must admit, it helps me a lot to solve problems!

SysDatabaseTransDelete

Ever needed to have a clean data installation without transactions.
Imagine you are in front of a go live and the customer added their settings correct in their test environment.
Normally I would perform an export of all tables excluding the transactions.

Now I found a class which can do this for me!
SysDatabaseTransDelete!

DAXCONF – Day 1

The first day started with a keynote. In this keynote, an important statement they mentionned was that AX2012 was not just a new release of the Dynamics AX product, but just a new way of experiencing ERP.

They mentionned that AX2012 contains over 1200 enhancements .
Off the record I also heard that the AX 2012 release is changed more then the sum of changes from AX2.5 => AX3.0 => AX4.0 => AX2009. Which should be quiet impressive.

A touch on new functionalities:
- Table inheritance. It is now possible to have tables inheriting from each other. This minimizes developer efforts

- Date effective records. They added some functionality called date effectiveness, to have records which are bound to a start and from date being treated in the same way throughout the entire AX application. These tables can be linked to ‘main’ tables.

BTW: We saw a lot of new properties on tables, we’ll have to study them to keep up!

- RecId Surrogate Keys and links.
=> Building now relationships with RecId and using sort of an ‘IdentificationGroup’ fieldgroup displaying (and selecting) the descriptive fields (for ex. name or description, or car ‘make’ and ‘model’) instead of the RecId column which is actually stored. An impressive thing to see, also because it is also multi-level, meaning that you can in the Identification fieldgroup also have a RecId reference to another table, and then this ones Identification group fields will be added, which can also … and so on.
Impressive system to see at work. But performance when being displayed in grids?

- AX Model principle within the layers and ‘removal/fix’ of the Element ID problem(s).
Seems to be partly a nice feature and partly also seems to contain disadvantes.
I think it will need to become more clear when using it. Also, Microsoft is still working on these topics.
Another thing relying on this one:
AX application share is: BYE BYE . It’s all in the SQL database right now!
However, they are still experimenting/working on this one. In more previous pre-releases there were two databases: the model database containing code (model) and the second one containing business data.
But however they turned this into one database right now and it seems they’ll keep it this way since Microsoft is quiet about the two database system they used to have in earlier pre-releases.
But very attention point: when copying data from live to test or dev: you also copy the code!!!
So => the need to export the AX models of the Dev environment before restoring a backup from Live to Dev and then afterwards import the AX models again!

- Eventing in X++: a nice and exciting feature. But not useful in every case off course.
Also nice: possibility to add event handlers in X++ or in managed code. It’ll be a question which one to choose off course in which case.
Tomorrow also a session on debugging those.
Because this will also becom an attention point I think: if something goes wrong: you’ll need to debug X++ as well as managed code.
Also got a small demo of the performance improvement(s) when running X++ code compiled to IL code (for example batch classes and services).

As a last session I went to a MRP Diagnostics Chalk & Talk:
They claimed to have rewritten the MRP logic in this AX2012 and really are working with constraints now.
The intercompany MRP should also be improved.
They mentionned a Kanban scheduling board which was really impressive (Thanks to .NET integration in the forms)
As a last new cool feature, they added a diagnostics tool for the planners to look under the hood to diagnose possible errors of setup.

As a recap, I would say there are a lot of new features in the technical and functional area which we need to understand. When we do, I hope we’ll have some great implementations with AX2012.

Cheers!

DAXCONF – Registratie

Gisteren een zware dag gehad om de verplaatsing België -> Seattle te maken. Opgestaan om 5am en naar Schiphol gereden om op tijd te zijn voor de vlucht via Delta naar Seattle.
Na een lange wachttijd bij de ‘customs’ kan ik gelukkig een taxi delen met Kurt Juvyns van Microsoft België (nogmaals bedankt Kurt!) om naar het hotel in Bellevue te reizen.

Door de jetlag was ik natuurlijk deze morgen rond 5am al wakker. Tijdens het ontbijtje al enkele ex-collega’s van Edan tegengekomen.

Daarnaast ben ik me gaan registreren op de Microsoft Campus. Dat is dus echt niet te geloven hoeveel gebouwen er staan! Dat is – zonder te overdrijven – te vergelijken met een dorp!

Tijdens de registratie kregen we een laptoprugzak en windjasje. Toch leuke gadgets!
Daarnaast is de officiele naam bekend geworden: Dynamics AX 2012!

Deze avond is er van 6 tot 9 nog een receptie waar we ongetwijfeld bekenden tegen zullen komen!

De sessies die ik morgen ga volgen:

08:30 – 10:00: Opening Keynote

10:30 – 11:45: Programming models improvements Part 1

13:00 – 14:15: Programming models improvements Part 2

14:45 – 16:00: Developing in .NET Managed Code and other X++ Enhancements

16:30 – 17:45: Models and the meta data architecture

18:15 – 19:15: Models and meta data architecture Q&A

Tot morgenavond (woensdagmorgen voor jullie) met een verslag van iedere sessie!

Delete action “Cascade + restricted”

Have you never wondered what the option “Cascade + restricted” means on the Delete Actions property.

We know Cascade will remove the related record in the other table as well and Restricted will block the deletion if a related record is found.

Cascade + restricted can be used in the next situation where you have a cascade relation with a master table and a detail table. This detail table has a restricted+cascade delete action with a third table. When the would delete the first master table, the cascade property tries to delete the detail table, BUT because there is a restricted+cascade delete action on that detail table, the deletion will be aborted.

Microsoft Aims for Increased Adoption with Dynamics AX Light User Licensing

Businesses need solutions that reflect the way people really work. They need to ensure that all their employees have the tools as well as the information they need to do their jobs and to work productively. But sometimes it can be just too expensive for companies to extend the reach of all their systems to each and every employee.
Microsoft’s Light User licensing for Dynamics AX attempts to meet these broader employee needs with access the critical business data from AX without a full user license, said Victor Waschtschenko, Dynamics Tech Specialist ERP, Microsoft Corp., in a webinar devoted to the Dynamics AX Light User License.
The Microsoft Dynamics AX Light User is a partial-access license for Dynamics AX, a lower cost way to give employees access to Microsoft Dynamics data, according to the company. Using the Microsoft Dynamics AX Light User license, employees can interact with Microsoft Dynamics financial, human resources, and operational information within the Microsoft Office software they use everyday including Excel, Outlook, and Word, Waschtschenko said.
Businesses want to extend the value of their Dynamics AX investments across their organizations to break down the wall between the back office and the front office and bring more business insight to their user communities, said Waschtschenko.
“This community has typically relied on people inside the wall to get them the information they need to be effective and the processes they require to be productive in their jobs,” he said. “They have been supported by a series of disconnected systems or manual procedures, leaving many inefficiencies throughout an organization. This wall has made it difficult for companies to operate at their full potential and made decision making a guessing game in many cases.”
And Microsoft is helping them to tear that wall down, he said.
“In a sense what they’re doing is breaking down the wall between back office processes and front office processes from an internal perspective and an external perspective,” he said. “They’re targeting such things as enhanced productivity in terms of how people do work and who does the work, extended knowledge, better decision making capabilities across the whole organization, more connectivity in a collaborative environment, and more value from an ERP investment.”
In other words, Microsoft’s goal with these light user licenses is to extend the reach of ERP and increase user adoption rates.
“Driving the use of ERP across their organizations are deeper and broader, self sufficient users, flexibility in how users interact and gain access to the solution in their daily work, making their tasks easier and making information readily available with tools that they are familiar with in terms of use,” Waschtschenko said.
The access rights under the Light User license allow users to perform employee self-service tasks, operational tasks, and reporting through interfaces like Microsoft Office and SharePoint client software.
“The investment is extended through the enterprise business portal,” Waschtschenko said. “What you have is Microsoft Office, SharePoint, SQL Server-combining that whole enterprise portal environment and providing users the right amount of business process capabilities to do their work, but not all the functions you would typically see in a power user environment.”
The bottom line is that customers want to get the right information, the right reports into the right hands at the right time, and the AX Light User license is helping them do that, he said.

Source

Migrating X++ web forms to AX 2009 EP asp.net framework – Solutions Monkey – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

Migrating X++ web forms to AX 2009 EP asp.net framework – Solutions Monkey – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 EP introduced the asp.net web framework. In the prior versions, the web user interface logic was defined entirely in X++. Asp.net framework has lots of great benefits , the big ones being AJAX capabilities, rich out of the box controls and the power of .net and asp.net for customization, extensibility, performance and reliability.

Here are the topic related to migrating existing X++ web forms to asp.net EP user controls.

1. Use the SysEPWebFormConverter to move the Web form datasources to the dataset and the user control. For simple cases, it should automate everything.

2. Refer to the migrating code pattern document and move the code as needed to the dataset X++ methods or to C# in user control as suggested by this document

3. Refer to the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 EP dev cook book for general development tips-n-tricks