Topic: ‘Development’

There are many data maintenance tasks that are simply too big for manual updating, but too small to justify writing scripts and using IT resources.  Dynamics AX 2009 features a Fill Utility that allow you to update multiple records at the same time.  For example, if you decide to change the Cash Discount for all customers or a group of customers, you can use fill utility to update all the selected customers at the same time.

1. Open the form where the field that you want to update is displayed.
2. Right-click the field that you want to update and select Record info from the menu.
3. Click the “Fill Utility” button.
4. Use the Inquiry to select which records should be updated.  For example, if you only wanted to update the Cash Discount for customers in a certain State, then you would select ‘Sales District’ in the ‘Field’ field that is related to the Customers Table.  This will return only customers that match that criteria.
5. Once the Fill Utility form is open, you can see the records you are about to change/update.  Remember, in this form you can remove any records you do not wish to update.
6. Click OK, and the New Field Value window opens.  From here you enter the desired field and click OK again.  This will update your records!

Of note; not all fields are available in AX for Fill Utility.  Also, not all users have access to Fill Utility.  This feature is only available if the Fill utility configuration key is selected and the Fill utility security key is enabled.

To view changes that were made using the Fill Utility, see Basic/Inquires/Fill Utility Log

Microsoft Press has released Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 as a book application for the iPhone.  This book is a must have for many AX professionals.  The app features the full version of the book, full text search, dictionary, and the ability to add notes.  And at $5.99, it’s a great value over the $40-$70 for the tree-and-pulp version.  It’s available here.  (iTunes required).

If anyone knows of pdf version of this book (or any other AX book), please let us know.

I had an interesting issue from a client recently.  They were importing Bill of Material data into AX and validating the data.  When they went to mass calculate all the Bills of Material however, they ran into an issue that none that had active Item dimensions worked.  What we discovered is that the item dimension combination need to be setup for the mass calculation to work for Bills of Material.  This can be accomplished via a set of code as follows:

I was reminded this week that while the Application Integration Framework is a fantastic tool, many systems that people integrate with do not have XML capability out of the box.  Most systems however, will have the ability to export a flat file (.csv, etc).  While I prefer the ease of use of the exchange of AIF, sometimes it is not cost effective to implement.  The flat files can instead be easily integrated with Dynamics AX by creating a class that extends RunBaseBatch to get a file name from a user, then use the CommaIO class to process that file.  The method below is an example of a method that could be run after getting the Filename back to the class: