Microsoft Dynamics AX blog by Zubair

Today I got a chance to review another book from Packt publications. This book is on SSRS report development titled Dynamics AX 2012 reporting cookbook by Kamalakannan Elangovan. This book is a collection of 50+ techniques to get you up and running with report development using SSRS in Dynamics AX. Some of the great features of this book are, Develop all kind of reports ranging from autodesign, matrix, multicolumn, line and gauge reports Learn how to use query, RDP, XML feeds and OLAP cubes as datasources for your reports Learn how to use SQL report builder for creating reports Learn how to upgrade reports from previous versions to Dynamics AX 2012 Learn how to add dimensions to reports Learn how to assess report performance and improve them The language is very fluid and there are clear illustrations to help the reader. Also, every topic has clear code snippets to explain the code in detail. If you are serious about improving your report development skills and want to be...

Back in the days of Dynamics AX 4.0 & Dynamics AX 2009, developers had few choice when picking a good book to learn Dynamics AX development. My personal choice was the Inside Dynamics AX book from the Microsoft press and the Microsoft Dynamics AX cookbook by Mindaugas Pocius. Packt publications have been publishing a lot of cookbooks on various topics in Dynamics AX. They have more than 10 books on various topics in Dynamics AX. Recently I got a chance to review one of their book - Extending Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Cookbook by Murray Fife . As the name suggests, this book is not specific about Dynamics AX, but how to extend Dynamics AX with other Microsoft technologies like SharePoint reporting tools like Power View and Power Pivot creating various analytical dashboards and BI scorecards collaborating with MS Outlook & Lync creating help documents for your customization creating web services in Dynamics AX organizing workflows creating role centers in Dynami...

Cumulative update pack 2 for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 has been released. This pack contains close to 70 fixes for various bugs. The pack also contains the cumulative update pack 1 for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 which was released earlier. The build number after applying this pack will be 6.0.947.280 You can download the pack and read more about the fixes in the pack here .

In Dynamics AX 2012, the dimensions framework has gone for a complete makeover. We can now have an unlimited number of financial dimensions. In Dynamics AX 4 and Dynamics AX 2009, the dimensions were actually stored as an array of string fi?>elds. This has changed in Dynamics AX 2012 where the dimension is stored as a recid. Recently I came across a requirement where if the CostCenter dimension was set to a particular value, the department dimension's value should change to a different value and vice versa. I developed the code and thought it will be a good idea to share it here. My requirement was in the ProjTable form but you can use this code in any of your form which uses the default financial dimensions. Override the DefaultDimension field's dataChanged() method on your main datasource and add the below code. // Financial dimension change code - Zubair - Begin public void dataChanged() { DimensionAttribute dimToBeChanged; DimensionAttributeValue dimAttr...

Microsoft has recently released the Day in the Life Benchmark documents on PartnerSource. You can read more about it on the Dynamics Ax Performance Team Blog . The benchmark numbers shared there are really encouraging and truly shows that Dynamics AX 2012 is a robust and agile erp platform to base your business on. Note: PartnerSource or CustomerSource login is required.

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...

In Dynamics AX 2012, one of the key area that has gone a total overhaul is Security. In Dynamics AX 4.0 and Dynamics AX 2009, the security model was module based. Users were assigned to user groups which grouped permissions to the various objects. These permissions were controlled by security keys. The biggest drawback of this model was that you could not have the same security user group apply across multiple companies. You still had to create the same user group across different groups. With Dynamics AX 2012, all this has changed. The security model in Dynamics AX 2012 is role based. This means that you can relate the day to day business processes to roles. Users are assigned to roles. Roles contain a group of duties or privileges. It is logically very easy now to configure security in Dynamics AX 2012. The Security keys in the AOT are now obsolete in Dynamics AX 2012. It is present for backward compatibility. If you right click on the Security keys node, you dont have an option ...