Microsoft Dynamics AX is an ERP solution for complex single site and multi-site, multilanguage global enterprises. This flexible and agile solution provides both advanced built-in functionality and an industry leading integrated development environment, allowing an organization to provide even higher levels of fit. This book should be in the tool belt of any software engineer who works with Dynamics AX.
This book aims at providing software engineers and those involved in developing solutions within Dynamics AX with clear guidance of best practices, and theory and practical examples covering broad areas of the Dynamics AX integrated development environment and surrounding technologies. Even for experienced software engineers, this book will provide a good source of reference for efficient software development. The book's easy-to-follow practical guidance will help your solutions to be easier to maintain, extend, and upgrade.
In order to facilitate this, the book follows the development of a solution as a means to explain the design and development of data structures, classes, forms, BI, menu structures, and security. Concepts such as models, layers, software development patterns, and frameworks are explained and have been given a real-world context and perspective using the authors' experiences to point out the many traps that lay in wait, demonstrating not only how to write flexible solutions, but also why a design approach has been taken.
The structure of the book was designed so that it is useful in a practical sense from the initial chapters, without sacrificing the required theory that is needed to provide the necessary depth of knowledge when working with Dynamics AX. By Chapter 3, Creating the User Interface, we have a working solution for maintaining data, and by the end of Chapter 7, Designing Your Security Model, we cover most of what is required from many solutions. The earlier chapters provide a fast-paced tutorial for new developers to AX and a refresher for those already developing in AX using the latest best practices and software development patterns. The later chapters cover advanced development techniques and features that will help even the experienced Dynamics AX software engineers.
The sample solution was designed and developed as the book was written, and is available for download. It was co-developed by two authors living in different countries using Team Foundation Server with Visual Studio Online.
With this comprehensive tutorial, you will be armed with the knowledge and insight you need to develop well design solutions that will help your organization to get the most value from this comprehensive solution for both this and upcoming releases of Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Chapter 1, Preparing Our Solution, provides both the theory and practical steps that are followed when starting work on a new solution. This includes minimizing code footprint; creating a model, project, and label file; configuring source control; and designing the technical solution and test plans.
Chapter 2, Creating Data Structures, guides us through the creation of the data structures used for our hypothetical solution, bringing in new concepts such as table inheritance, extended data types, enumerated types, and referential integrity.
Chapter 3, Creating the User Interface, includes the creation of the user interface using standard design patterns for development of the forms and menu structure. We also demonstrate how to make form logic reusable by moving code to a class.
Chapter 4, Creating Business Logic and Hooking into Core AX, covers how to handle table events in a class for easier reusability by adding navigation and using number sequences. It also includes how to hook into core AX using eventing and delegates to minimize the footprint on standard code.
Chapter 5, Adding Business Intelligence, provides practical hands-on guidance for the creation of parts in order to provide real-time, pervasive business intelligence to our users through Info parts, Form parts, Cues, and Cue groups. Also covered is the interaction between form parts and the host form and how to control queries programmatically.
Chapter 6, Extending the Solution, lets you dive deeper into the solution we have developed by adding secondary list pages, drop dialogs, and reusable business logic with data contracts and exposing business logic to external applications through services.
Chapter 7, Designing Your Security Model, covers the design and development of the security of our solution, including roles, duties, privileges, and process cycles. We also cover code access permissions and how to secure data through the use of data policies (extensible data security).
Chapter 8, Customizing Standard AX, provides guidance on how (and where) to modify standard or third-party code without suffering the maintenance cost associated with upgrading the modified code. Also included is using standard frameworks, demonstrated by example of vendor electronic payments.
Chapter 9, Advanced Features and Frameworks, demystifies the more advanced topics such as the SysOperation framework, global address book, and the financial dimension framework through clear practical examples of how these should be used.
Chapter 10, Advanced Development Techniques, covers date effective tables, exception handling, computed columns on views, and controlling the tier our code runs on. We also step into the world of using metadata, making sense of advanced techniques many may shy away from.
Chapter 11, Unit and Performance Testing, covers practical guidance on unit and performance testing, including how to create automated test plans that help us avoid the regression that changes often incur. Performance testing and diagnosis is explained through the use of the code profiler, which covers analysis on both the code and database performance.
Appendix A, Efficient Design and Development with Microsoft Dynamics AX, covers the technical overview of Dynamics AX, models, layers, and the integrated development environment.
Appendix B, Using Version Control, provides guidance on how to use version control covering the interaction between version control and models and layers, how to build your solution, and how version control works with label files.
Appendix C, Code Editor Scripts, provides information and code samples on how to extend the standard code editor scripts, saving your time while developing code.