Issue: Dimension lookup “selected record invisible” – Dynamics AX 2012

On a server machine which was used for UAT testing the users were complaining about the selected record not visible in the lookup as seen here,

 

As we all know the financial dimension lookup uses the segmented entry control which is a managed control. Segmented entry control being a managed control we have limited handle to the behaviour and appearance. So after some search around we ended up that it was a windows theme related issue. If you happen to use AX2012 on a server machine (Windows Server 2012) or using the VPC you may notice this issue.

The solution is to change for a better theme, but hold there is a point there. By default windows server 2012 doesn’t allow you to change the theme. This feature is called a “Desktop experience”, this must be enabled to activate the the personalize option through which you can change the theme. See here on how to enable desktop experience for Window server 2012  http://www.win2012workstation.com/desktop-experience/ . If you are on a standard Microsoft Dynamics AX VPC machine then desktop experience is already enabled. You just need to make the choice of a better theme. Once we had changed our theme the lookup looked much better.

Interested in learning SSRS – Attend my SSRS session at AXUG. See more details here[/quote]

 

Sharpen your SSRS skills. Buy the Dynamics AX reporting cookbook

 

Project creation tool for extended classes – Dynamics Ax 2012

Productivity Enhancement tool – Ax 2012

Though cross reference is the best tool to find out references and usage details there are times when we want to search for a certain keyword to identify an example.  With the number AOT components increasing the search process is also painfully long so if we can narrow down the search then there is nothing better like that.

Recently i have been working on the SysOperationFramework and SSRS reports. I frequently used the type hierarchy browser to  find the classes that extend a base class say the UI builder in an effort to look for class that implements a certain method or usage examples of certain kind of control like the reference control. The bad part of type hierarchy browser is that you can’t search over it. So here is a simple tool that i built for myself to help through this.

This tool when initiated will prompt for a base class through a dialog, post clicking ‘ok’ it will add all the classes to the project node. This helps to narrow down the search.  Watch the video to understand and click here to download.

The other problem with type hierarchy browser was that i always wanted to open the classes shown in the tree node through a double click but i don’t know for some reason this was not done. I always had to right click and select edit. This project also additionally contains the minor change that will allow you to open the classes just by a double click. Watch the video to understand and click here to download.

Keep watching this space there is more to come in the next release
1. Create project by attributes – Find all the class that has a certain attribute and create a project
2. Create project from Type Hierarchy browser – The tool will be integrated to the type hierarchy browser
3. Create project by Interface – create a project of all classes that implements a interface

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Dynamics AX 2012 Enterprise Portal Development Cookbook

The EP team @Microsoft has come up with a wonderful 160 page cook book for EP Development. The book is free and you can download as is from here EP Cook book

The book authored by Mey Meenakshisundaram and Anees Ansari talks on User Interfaces, Datasources and Datasets, Frameworkcontrols. The framework controls gives you in depth understanding of each control with clear code examples. This is followed by a detailed explanation of the list and detail pages covering the different elementary methods. There is also an advanced section for the list and detailed page that gets deeper through topics such as List page interaction. Then goes on to detail more on the general development concepts related to EP like Sessions, Metadata, Pages, FIlters, lookups and more. The book ends with a brief on the Sharepoint integration from Enterprise search.

The book is exhaustive, informative and is filled with several code examples that you can use. Thanks to the Microsoft EP team for a wonderful book that is definitely going to help us much more than expected.

Click here to read the original post EP book blog post

Download the book here EP Cook book

Packt Publishing offers 20-30% Discount on all Dynamics books

Guys planning to buy a book on Dynamics Ax, NAV, GP then you don’t find a better time then this.Pack Publishing is carrying on a “Dynamics Month” sale and as a part of it offering a discount of 20 – 30% on all their dynamics related publications and a chance to win free access to their e-library

check out here to see the offer Please refer to http://www.packtpub.com/article/exclusive-offer-on-microsoft-dynamics-books

Also excerpts from their press release,

Packt has produced a multitude of bestsellers in Sure Step, NAV, GP and AX – and not only do theyexcel in terms of quantity, but in quality, with each book garnering numerous positive reviews. And to celebrate this achievement Packt is crowning May: Dynamics Month, offering terrific discounts on all Dynamics books, as well as holding a competition providing you with the chance to win one year’s free access to PacktLib – Packt’s online library!

Recent Dynamics publications include:

• Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step 2010

• Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 Cookbook

• Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Programming Cookbook

Throughout 2011 Packt will continue to build-upon this success with a further focus of branching into CRM.

Adjusting the No.of decimal property for Quantity field in Dynamics Ax

Few months back i posted this question on the Dynamics community forum “How can i change the number of decimal places to three for Price and Quantity”

As customer asked as for more decimal places we initially thought of modifying th number of decimals property but only to know that it could be in vain. The best way is to find the alternate for it. Here is Denis Patrakov reply to my query in the community.

You should not change EDTs or something like that. Yes, AX uses two digits precision by default and you should get used to it. As to prices and amounts, there are just too many places in the AX application where an amount is rounded to two digits (especially in the financial module) that you just can’t do anything with it. In case your customer wants to deal with copper in tonnes with a kg precision he sould use kg at least as a storage unit for copper. A storage unit for an inventory item should always be the least possible unit in which an item can be measured with at most a two digits precision. To set a price agreement for a tonne with a “three digits precision” you should use PriceUnit greater then 1, f.e. set a price of $50000,45 for a tonne with the PriceUnit of 10 – this will give you an actual price of $5000,045 for a tonne. See also Setting up item price to accept more than two decimal places.

Note also that you can’t just go and change an inventory item storage unit. AX stores quantity in all inventory transactions in the storage unit and it does not store the unitId itself! So if you have a copper measured in tonnes and have a transaction with a qty of 10 (tonnes) then in case you change the copper’s stoage unit to kgs the transaction will become interpreted as with a qty of 10 kgs. So in case you deside to change an item’s storage unit you should create another item with the storage unit you need, block the first item and use the second item ever after. You can also setup the second item as an alternative item for the first one and you should use loss & profit and count journals to “pass” the stock from one item to another.
Once again: you just can’t make AX to use a precision of more then two digits throughout the application, there are other means to accomplish your task.”

This is what we finally we what we went for and the customer in fact was quite happy.   It is always better to use the Price unit field to adjust your quantity decimal places then to fight for increasing the number of decimal places.

To understand the decimal places concept in detail refer to this nice post  with experiments to figure out what the no of decimals really mean.http://sjakalax.blogspot.com/2010/11/noofdecimals-property.html

A Better way of filing bugs/Recording features`

As a tester it is an interesting task to find bugs :)..but the pain point is the detailed filing of the bug which otherwise comes back saying not reproducable :(… Being a small development team we need to manage this efficiently while making sure that we reduce the time in writing the repro-steps. Jing helped us over come this problem. JING is a free ware from techsmith that helps to make small five minutes video and screenshots with ability to add descriptions. It is much easier to record video instead writing repro steps. These days we also use it as a way to publish new features to our functional team.All Categories

I would higly recommend Jing for anyone.Download here http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/…. to try it out now.

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Debugging Tip for Dynamics Ax

Few tips for debugging….

> While debugging I observe that several people abruptly stop the execution. This can result in corrupting the data like blocking a journal, ttsbegin/ttscommit imbalances. It is always better if we instead direct/drag[Use run to cursor ctrl + F10] the execution cursor to a throw error statement. This will throw an error and rightly revert all changes made so far through the execution preventing any data corruption.

> When we debug errors it is easy to reproduce since we can use the same data. But if the case is something like imbalance in amount posted during invoice then every time we create a new order again as the data can’t be used anymore. In these cases it is easy if you write an “throw error” statement at the end of the execution. This will prevent the order from being invoiced and you will be able to reuse the same order until you find the error.

…… Better debugging 😉

Part of Dynamics Ax community now…

Hi All,

Pleased to let you all know that this blog is now part of the dynamics Ax community.

Look here  for the … Welcome Note from the community and the Community – RSS Syndication

Thanks Again !!!!

Running AIF without Active directory in Dynamics Ax

It is necessary to ensure that the system is in a AD(Active Directory) before using AIF. But for developers/testers sometime they may want it to work even without the network & AD, Here is a article how to make small modifications to your AIF logic so that you can run it without network….

http://pawansaxblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/run-aif-without-active-directory.html

Setting up Form size during runtime in Dynamics Ax

Sometime we change  or construct a form at  runtime. In those situation we end up modifying/setting the width and height at run time itself.

there is one thing you need to keep in mind if you are doing that.

Don’t use the following way to set the size of the controls in forms

tabcontrol.width(FormWidth::ColumnWidth);
tabcontrol.height(FormHeight::ColumnHeight);

tabcontrol.width(100);
tabcontrol.height(200);

then nothing happens for the Form. The form size is actually set to zero.

Instead you must do it the following way….

For Auto/ColumnWidth, height properties, set it like this

  tabcontrol.widthMode(FormWidth::ColumnWidth);
  tabcontrol.heightMode(FormHeight::ColumnHeight);

For setting manual values set it like this

  tabcontrol.widthValue(100)
  tabcontrol.heightValue(200);

I’m not sure for what reason it is done like this 😦