Spotlight: Adding PowerView Dashboards To Dynamics AX 2012

Hi,

I hope everybody is doing great today and that you are ready to enjoy this long weekend.

Today I wanted to take the time and give a spotlight to one of my co-workers, Murray Fife. Murray Fife is a Senior Solutions Architect for Junction Solutions. He has contributed a lot to the community over the years and he is always paving the road on new topics regarding AX in general.

On this post, I would like to share a recent post he created on adding PowerView dashboards to AX 2012.



From the post "One of the built in features is the ability to create your own data from the base query that you run, and that data may be images rather than the traditional data types"

You can access his post from here.

I encourage you to read this post and follow Murray Fife to get his latest updates on AX 2012.

This is all for now folks.

Until next time.

Working with the AX 2012 EDT relation migration tool

Hi there!

This week I was faced with a couple of problems related to the relationships between tables made under an Extended Data Type (EDT). In my case, I learned that when relationships between tables exist through EDTs, they only capture a single field relationship and not necessarily a “real” relationship between tables.

A good example of this is when we assign an ItemId EDT to a custom field in a custom table. In this case, AX 2012 will ask you to create an EDT relationship, so I did. Later on the week, I was getting an error related to a violation of a primary key in the custom table I created when data was being inserted to it.

The error was related to the relationships being defined under an EDT as the kernel was have issues defining which relationship to examine first.

It took me a while to understand that the problem was the EDT relationship and after looking at some documentation it was easy to catch the issue as EDT relationships do not contain relationship metadata, such as cardinality and relationship type, and more often than not, they cannot be included in the relations node.

Luckily for us, AX 2012 provides a simple way to fix the EDT relations issues fairly easy. In fact, the migration can be done both manually or using the new EDT relation migration tool. However, if the data model is not correct, there are cases where we are going to have to fix the EDT’s manually.

To begin using the EDT relation migration tool, open the form for the tool by using the navigation path Tools > Code upgrade > EDT relation migration tool as seen in the picture below.

NOTE: Just keep in mind that if you are using this tool for the first time, AX 2012 will ask you if you want to refresh all the EDT relationships data, click yes and the EDT Migration tool will open.

When the form has opened, follow the next steps:

1. Select a table from the Table name pane.
2. Select each relation in the EDT relations table and choose an action from the Migration action drop-down menu for each of them.
3. After you have set an action on all the relations for that table, click the Migrate single table button on the ribbon at the top of the form.

See Image for clarification:

What happens in the background?

1. The migration tool attempts to find a match for the EDT relation in the existing relations in the selected table. If a match is found, the SourceEDT property on the table relation is set to the name of the EDT.
2. However, if there is no match found in the table, the EDT migration tool will create a new table relationship only if the index (IndexType ) on the referenced table (shown by “”) is set to the correct table relationship.
3. Finally, the tool will not create a new table relation if the matching index for the EDT field on the referenced table is set to NoIndex, Unique, NonUnique.

Example: Migrating an EDT relation to a new table relation.

This example shows the case in which an EDT relation is migrated to a table where the table relation was previously not defined. The result from this example will be the creation of a new table relation.

The EDT PKTableField1 defines a relation to the PKTable.Field1 field, which is an alternate key AK1.

In addition, before the EDT migration, the FKTable.Field1 field uses the EDT PKTableField1, which makes it a foreign key into PKTable. However, there is no table relation defined on the FKTable, and the ExtendedDataType property on FKTable.Field1 is set to PKTableField1 instead.

We choose the FKTablle and under the Migration Action, we choose Migrate.

What happens in the background?

The EDT relation migration tool performs the following actions:

• The EDT migration tool creates the new relation to the PKTable under the Relations node of the FKTable. This relation will be of type Normal because the key is not the primary key.
• Then, the EDT migration tool will set the EDTRelation property of the PKTable relation to Yes. This is because the tool performs the direct migration of an EDT relation to the table relation.
• Then, the EDT migration tool creates one field link, FKTable.Field1 == PKTable.Field1, for the PKTable relation.
• Finally, the EDT migration tool will set the SourceEDT property of the field link to PKTableField1.

What to expect the next time we use the tables?

• All the APIs that used the EDT relation first on FKTable.Field1 will now find the same relation with the same field link under the PKTable relation by examining its SourceEDT property.
• If a table relation that refers to PKTable already exists in FKTable, all the APIs that used those table relations will not pick up the PKTable relation because it is flagged as an EDTRelation, and the PKTable relation to the Relations node of the FKTable, with its EDTRelation property set to Yes.

In addition to the above, we can also double check the outcome of the EDT migration tool by looking at the SourceEDT property of FKTable.Field1. This should have been set to PKTableField1 to maintain a relationship with the EDT.

Let recap for a minute on what we just went over. The EDT relation migration tool can be used to automate the following actions:

• Copy an EDT relation to all hosting tables.
• Automatically set the EDT migration properties (markers) to reflect migration status.
• Automatically populate relation metadata.
• Derive cardinality from the index on the foreign key.
• Derive the relationship type from the delete action/key composition.
• Determine role names.
• Report AOT objects impacted by the migration, depending on the relation used. The objects that can be affected include:
• Queries:
• Forms
• Delete actions on tables
• Data sets
• X++ reports

Well folks, I think this is it for now. I really hope you like this article and that can help you at some point in your AX 2012 adventure. Also, I will be writing a bit more about AX 2012 Retail and Inventory and Product management in AX 2012 soon, so don’t miss it!



Have a great and restful weekend!



Working with the LedgerGeneralJournalService AX 2012

Hi There!

I hope everyone had a good week and that you are ready for an excellent weekend.

As you may well be aware by now, in AX 2012 you can import data by using services. You can use these services to import Customers, GL transactions, Products, etc.

You can learn more about services and AIF in one of my posts called Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Services and (Application Integration Framework) AIF architecture , and you might want to take a look into Services and Application Integration Framework .

On this post, I would like to share with you some code to import GL transactions into AX 2012 using the LedgerGeneralJournalService available in AX 2012.

static void ImportGLTransWithLedgerGeneralJournalService(Args _args)

{

    // Set these variables.

    LedgerJournalNameId                     journalName = 'GenJrn';

    SelectableDataArea                        company = 'CEU';

    TransDate                                     transactionDate = 10\10\2012;

    str                                     line1MainAccount = '256369';

    str                                     line1FullAccount = '256369--';

    str                                     line2MainAccount = '400090';

    str                                     line2FullAccount = '400090-10-';

    str                                     line2Dimension1Name = 'BusinessUnit';

    str                                     line2Dimension1Value = '10';

    LedgerGeneralJournalService             ledgerGeneralJournalService;

    LedgerGeneralJournal                       ledgerGeneralJournal;

    AfStronglyTypedDataContainerList              journalHeaderCollection;

    LedgerGeneralJournal_LedgerJournalTable   journalHeader;

    AifEntityKeyList                                         journalHeaderCollectionKeyList;

    RecId                                                       journalHeaderRecId;

    AfStronglyTypedDataContainerList                   journalLineCollection;

    LedgerGeneralJournal_LedgerJournalTrans       journalLine1;

    AifMultiTypeAccount                                       journalLine1LedgerDimension;

    LedgerGeneralJournal_LedgerJournalTrans       journalLine2;

    AifMultiTypeAccount                                       journalLine2LedgerDimension;

    AifDimensionAttributeValue                             journalLine2Dim;

    AfStronglyTypedDataContainerList                   journalLine2DimCollection;

    ;

    ledgerGeneralJournalService = LedgerGeneralJournalService::construct();

    ledgerGeneralJournal = new LedgerGeneralJournal();

    // Create journal header.

    journalHeaderCollection = ledgerGeneralJournal.createLedgerJournalTable();

    journalHeader = journalHeaderCollection.insertNew(1);

    journalHeader.parmJournalName(journalName);

    // Create journal lines.

    journalLineCollection = journalHeader.createLedgerJournalTrans();

    // Line 1

    journalLine1 = journalLineCollection.insertNew(1);

    journalLine1.parmLineNum(1.00);

    journalLine1.parmCompany(company);

    journalLine1.parmTransDate(transactionDate);

    journalLine1.parmAccountType(LedgerJournalACType::Ledger);

    journalLine1.parmTxt('AX Wonders Journal Import test');

    journalLine1.parmAmountCurDebit(235.00);

 

    // Define Ledger Dimensions

    journalLine1LedgerDimension = journalLine1.createLedgerDimension();

    journalLine1LedgerDimension.parmAccount(line1MainAccount);

    journalLine1LedgerDimension.parmDisplayValue(line1FullAccount);

    journalLine1.parmLedgerDimension(journalLine1LedgerDimension);

    // Line 2

    journalLine2 = journalLineCollection.insertNew(2);

    journalLine2.parmLineNum(2.00);

    journalLine2.parmCompany(company);

    journalLine2.parmTransDate(transactionDate);

    journalLine2.parmAccountType(LedgerJournalACType::Ledger);

    journalLine2.parmTxt('AX Wonders Journal Import test');

    journalLine2.parmAmountCurCredit(500.00);

    journalLine2LedgerDimension = journalLine2.createLedgerDimension();

    journalLine2DimCollection= journalLine2LedgerDimension.createValues();

    journalLine2Dim= new AifDimensionAttributeValue();

    journalLine2Dim.parmName(line2Dimension1Name);

    journalLine2Dim.parmValue(line2Dimension1Value);

    journalLine2DimCollection.add(journalLine2Dim);

      // Define Ledger Dimensions

    journalLine2LedgerDimension.parmAccount(line2MainAccount);

    journalLine2LedgerDimension.parmDisplayValue(line2FullAcct);

    journalLine2LedgerDimension.parmValues(journalLine2DimCollection);

    journalLine2.parmLedgerDimension(journalLine2LedgerDimension);

    // Insert records.

    journalHeader.parmLedgerJournalTrans(journalLineCollection);

    ledgerGeneralJournal.parmLedgerJournalTable(journalHeaderCollection);

    journalHeaderCollectionKeyList =

        LedgerGeneralJournalService.create(ledgerGeneralJournal);

    journalHeaderRecId =

        journalHeaderCollectionKeyList.getEntityKey(1).parmRecId();

    info(strFmt("LedgerJournalTable.Recid = %1", int642str(journalHeaderRecId)));

}

That's all for now folks!