SSRS Reports now support the compare tool in Dynamics AX 2012 R2 CU7

As others have already reported CU7 (KB2885603) for Dynamics AX 2012 R2 has been released. I wanted to point out one new feature I haven't seen announced elsewhere. You can now use the compare tool in AX to view changes to SSRS reports between layers. See the screenshots below for an example of the change.

Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services

Microsoft recently launched a new Lifecycle Services site to help partners and customers manage and optimize their Dynamics AX implementations.
https://lifecycleservices.dynamics.com/

From the TechNet description:
Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services provides a cloud-based collaborative workspace that customers and their partners can use to manage Microsoft Dynamics AX projects from pre-sales to implementation and operations. Based on the phase of your project and the industry vertical, the site provides checklists and tools that you can use to help you manage the project. It also provides a dashboard so that you have a single place to get up-to-date project information.
Lifecycle Services is available to customers and partners as part of their support plans. You can access it with your CustomerSource or PartnerSource credentials. Go to the site.

Dynamics AX Inventory cube now present in AX 2012 R2

It was recently brought to my attention that Microsoft Dynamics AX finally ships with an inventory value cube out of the box in version 2012 R2. You can find details on the measures available in the cube here, which even includes some KPI's for inventory turns and other indicators. I'm looking forward to cracking this open and comparing it to the home grown inventory cube I built on AX 2009. The primary issue is that you can't simply look at inventtrans records because those statuses are updated over time as postings occur.

Other cubes added in AX 2012 R2 include Budget control, Budget plan (my team worked on this), Profit tax, and Retail. 

AX 2012 Cubes	AX 2012 R2 Cubes
Accounts payable cube (VendCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Accounts payable cube (VendCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Accounts receivable cube (CustCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Accounts receivable cube (CustCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
	Budget control cube (BudgetControlCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
	Budget plan cube (BudgetPlanCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Environmental sustainability cube (EMSCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Environmental sustainability cube (EMSCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Expense management cube (TrvCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Expense management cube (TrvCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
General ledger cube (LedgerCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	General ledger cube (LedgerCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
	Invent value cube (InventValueCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Production cube (ProdCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Production cube (ProdCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
	Profit tax totals cube (RTax25OLAP) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Project accounting cube (ProjCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Project accounting cube (ProjCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Purchase cube (PurchCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Purchase cube (PurchCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
	Retail cube (RetailCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Customer relationship management cube (smmCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Sales and marketing cube (smmSalesMarketingCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Sales cube (SalesCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Sales cube (SalesCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2
Workflow cube (WorkflowCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack	Workflow cube (WorkflowCube) for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2

Using Record Info and the importance of field groups on a form

I've often wondered about the Best Practice check in AX that requires all fields to be in a field group and why that is there. I assumed it was some sort of encouragement to use field groups on forms and reports, but today it occurred to me that there is another very valuable tool that uses this information (there are probably many others as well).

If you have the appropriate permissions in Dynamics AX you can right click on any field on a form, select record info, and then select "Show all fields" to open a new form which displays all of the fields in the table and their values regardless of if the field is on the form or not. This is useful for some power users if they are interested in knowing when a record was created or when it was last modified for instance.



Show all Fields

 

I shared this functionality with a user this week, but it wasn't until today that I realized how this form organizes fields into groups based on field groups to help the user find them. So in the future take some time and consideration when creating field groups or adding fields to groups so that users can find these more easily on the Record info screen.

Slow Inventory Reports

A user over on the AXUG Community recently posted a question about poor performance on the standard AX Inventory reports, specifically Physical Inventory by Dimension. It turns out the fix ended up being to clear the records in two tables in the database that are used only for building this report. Normally the records are created, the report run, and then the records are deleted. However if the process is cancelled the records can be left behind. Multiple users reported the same issue.

If you are having this issue or even minor performance issues with these reports, look into deleting all of the records in the InventSumDateTable and InventSumDateTrans tables via SQL.

If you haven't joined the AXUG Community forum yet go check it out. It's a great free resource for users.

Watch Convergence 2013 presentations free online

If you aren't able to attend the Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2013 conference in person in New Orleans you can still register to watch the keynote and other presentations live online.

Register for the virtual conference

Microsoft Advanta campus

Most people know that Redmond, Washington is home of the Microsoft Corporate campus, but the offices for Dynamics AX are actually in Bellevue, Washington. I took a few photos today for my online photography class at Proud Photography and I thought I'd share one of the images here.

Microsoft Advanta Campus

The other offices where Microsoft has major Dynamics AX development that I know about and have worked with teams from are Fargo, North Dakota and Vedbaek, Denmark.

Adding a color bar per company

A common question users often ask for is to change the color of AX forms when logged in to a different company. This comes from may legacy systems having this behavior. It turns out changing the background color on AX form results in a pretty ugly experience due to the many different layouts of form, group and subgroups, and other controls that would all have to have their backgrounds changed.

However one interesting way I found to provide similar behavior to this is to add a color bar across the top of forms similar to the workflow status bar indicating the company logged in to.

Customs integration with Dynamics AX for EDITrade and CANData

I just wanted to give a quick update on what I've been working on recently. We import product into both the US and to Canada, so we have a need to supply data to both US and Canadian customs.
There are two companies we are working with on this: EDITrade from Descartes for US Customs and CANData Systems for Canadian customs.

I know everyone is gearing up for Convergence 2013, but I'll be back here in Seattle working away. I'd be interested in knowing if anyone finds any other companies that have integrated EDITrade or CANData with Dynamics AX.

Ultimately I plan on providing more details on our integration and some examples.

Enabling a new inventory dimension and the AllBlank dimension Id

I recently explored the idea of enabling a new inventory dimension to track a new type of inventory in Dynamics AX. There were a few goals that I wanted to stick to.

1. Use one of the existing inventory dimensions rather than adding a new dimension. InventColor, InventSizeId, InventBatchId, and InventSerialId were all candidates.
2. While technically we would allow blank values, I wanted to have two explicit values to use rather than assuming blank was a meaningful value.
3. Due to #2, update all existing transactions in the system to be one of the explicit values.

The steps necessary to complete this are straight forward, but there are some words of caution I want to add along the way which I discovered in my investigation.

Aggregate, Group by, and Having functions in SysQueryForm

Have you ever wanted to use the SysQueryForm in Microsoft Dynamics AX to define a query that had an aggregate (sum, min, max, etc.) and a group by clause? In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 this is now possible. Read on to learn more about this little known feature.

ParseXPOs

Many people may be familiar with the CombineXPOs.exe utility for Dynamics AX that mfp has shared on his blog. This utility is useful to take many individual xpo files and create a single large xpo file that can be imported into Microsoft Dynamics AX either from the command line or manually in the client. I recently had a scenario where I wanted to do the opposite, export a large project from Dynamics AX and then parse the project into individual XPO's. This was useful to compare all of the objects installed in a layer in multiple enviroments. Hit the jump for the source code and binaries.

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog about Dynamics AX.

I've spent the last 5 years working for a vendor for Microsoft helping build the public sector solution for Dynamics AX. I worked on versions of AX before 2009, on the entire release for 2012, and also on the start of the next yet to be released version of AX.

Recently I started working as the Sr. Dynamics AX developer for a private company that uses Dynamics AX internally.

Most of my prior experience working on AX was admittedly in the financials module but in my new job I will be getting very familiar with the inventory module. I'm also very interested in architecture and the build environment so some of my initial posts will be in the area of setting up a development environment for a private company.

I hope you enjoy my posts and that I'm able to offer some of my unique insights to the online discussion of Dynamics AX.