How to check project budget amount through code in Dynamics AX 2012?

-
In my earlier post, I had shown how easy it is to enable budget control on projects. You can read that here.

I got a couple of questions on it and I thank my readers for the interest. I found one of the question to be very generic and the scenario described was something which many customers may be doing.

The scenario given was,

The customer creates a lot of project transactions on a daily basis but posting of them is done through a batch only on the month end.

So the customer has allocated an approved budget of 1000. We have 20 journals each with an amount of 100. Now we post these journals in a batch. So, after posting 10 journals, the whole budget will be exhausted. So from the 11th journal onwards, we will be receiving an error that budget will be exceeded by 100.

Now the question was, is there any way to know before hand while creating the transaction that there isn't a sufficient budget and hence the transaction will not be posted.

Well, it surely can be done with a little customization.

What we need to do is to get the budget amounts for the category of the project transaction being created and see if the amount is greater or equal to the line amount being posted. If the budget amount is less or zero, we throw an appropriate error to the user.

The project budget engine is driven by a class ProjBudgetTransactionManager. A method getBudgetForSelectedPeriod() is responsible to fetch the budget amounts for a gieven category in a given period. This method is declared private so we cannot access it from any of our classes. What I have done is duplicate the logic in my class.

I've added a menu item of my class to the hour journal lines form. Clicking on the menu button will perform a check and let the user know if the line can be posted or not.

You can customize this further to call the method in validateWrite() and stop the record from being saved. Or you can add a a window control and show an image if the line cannot be posted. It all depends on how you want to handle scenarios like these.

Different businesses have their own way of dealing with issues like these. Some customers prefer to catch the issue at the root level while others take some remedial actions when an issue is hit.

For those of you who are interested, the code for the changes required for this scenario can be downloaded here.

Hope this helps. Thats all for today folks, do check back soon for more.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to add empty ranges in query

-
In Dynamics AX programming, a common mistake I have seen when it comes to query ranges is passing an empty string value to the range. The developer here is expecting it to show all the records where the range field is empty. Instead, what we get is all records without the range being applied. As baffling as it may seems, it is easily explainable. The query engine in Dynamics AX, will not add a range if you don’t specify a value or if you specify an empty string because an empty string is treated as no value. So the following code will result in this SQL statement, query = new Query(); qbds = query.addDataSource(tableNum(ProjTable)); qbr = qbds.addRange(fieldNum(ProjTable, Name)); qbr.value(''); Select first fast * from ProjTable; But what was expected was something like, Select first fast * from ProjTable where Name == ''; So to work around this issue, use the SysQuery::valueEmptyString() static method which parses the empty strings correctly so that it...
Read more

The field with ID '0' does not exist in table - Cause and resolution.

-
Image
Hello readers, In Dynamics AX coding, you should have come across this error sometime - The field with ID '0' does not exist in table 'SomeTable' So what causes this error and what is the possible resolution to it? Well, the most likely cause for this error is a missing mapping in a table map. Let us look at an example. I've a simple Map named CustVendAccount with one Account field. I've created two mappings - one with CustTable's AccountNum field and for the otehr mapping, I just specify VendTable but no field. This is how my map looks like, Now, I've a simple job which just passes either CustTable or VendTable as an argument and then we print the Account field in the map. static void CustVendAccountMap(Args _args) { CustTable custTable; VendTable vendTable; void readMap(CustVendAccount _custVendAccount) { info(strFmt("Value from table %1 is %2",tableId2name(_custVendAccount.TableId), _custV...
Read more

Get selected records in Dynamics AX 2012

-
Image
In my earlier post, we discussed how we can retrieve all selected records on a list page. You can read that post here . Retrieving all selected records from a caller form is very easy. The code for this can be found in a number of places in standard Dynamics AX codebase. The general approach is to use the dataSource.getFirst(1) statement to get the first selected record and loop through the remaining using dataSource.getNext() . In Dynamics AX 2009, a new class was introduced for this purpose. This was the MultiSelectionHelper class. In Dynamics AX 2012, another new class has been introduced to retrieve the selected records. This is the MultiSelectionContext class. The MultiSelectionHelper class is an application class. It presents two constrcutors. The standard constructor method just creates a new instance of the MultiSelectionHelper class. When this construct is used, you will have to explicitly set the dataSource to be used for fethcing selected records. This can be done...
Read more