fedotenko.info

This is a blog of Dennis Fedotenko - a well known proffessional in Ax functionality and development. He writes rare, but usually his articles can be a key for understanding principles behind ax functionality.

Dennis has a great reputation in Russian Ax community, and now he translated some of his articles to English.

AxPath plugin for Tabax which works with Ax3, Ax4, Ax2009

Now you can download AxPath.dll (with sources) which works with Ax 3, Ax 4, Ax 2009. Previously it worked only if Ax3 was installed.

Ivan fixed it to work with Ax2009, now I have extended it to probe registry keys for Ax2009, Ax4, Ax3 (in that particular order) and work with the version found first.

If you do not know what AxPath and Tabax are - look at http://axaptapedia.com/AxPath, http://axaptapedia.com/Tabax

AxPath plugin originated by AndyD from http://axforum.info

Book review: “Quality Assurance for Dynamics AX-Based ERP Solutions”

As some other bloggers, I have received the book for review. Here are my impressions…

This book is written about several aspects of quality assurance in Dynamics Ax implementation projects. I think the main focus is on customizations development because most topics related to it.

Quality in the following areas is covered by the book:

• Code
  
• User interface
  
• Security
  
• Performance
  
• Organizational
  

Detail level differs from topic to topic: for example code topics contain introductory material and detailed BP rules, user interface topic consists of very concrete checklists and security aspects are showed almost only as general word about trustworthy computing. The book is not very thick (~150 pages), but contains information only in textual form (text, tables, lists), so information density is higher than in most modern books filled with screenshots and code samples.

My overall impression - good enough as introductory book. It can be useful if you are:

• Novice developer and want to have overview about what quality in dynamics ax means
  
• Some kind of manager who want to build a development process with focus on quality (you can borrow some rules and checklists)
  
• Some other non-developer who wants to have overall outline about quality in Ax
  

I think, there are some topics, which should be covered by the future books of such direction, but haven't been covered by this book:

• Administration issuer
  
• Functional setup issues
  

Other topics (such as end-user training) which are parts of real implementation projects but haven't been represented in the book

Sidax 0.4 b 6 will show you what groups can access selected main menu items

download (85K)

What's new:

• multiple selection of main menu items


• new item named "Show access" in the main menu item's context menu. If you choose this item all groups which have access to that item will be output to infolog

BeauSQL -- SQL beautifier

Download: binaries, sources



The purpose is to make SQL traces code more structured and core readable.

This tool consists of two parts:

• DLL, which is written in Haskell - a very interesting functional programming language, and it do actual work of parsing and pretty printing


• Small class in Ax which is a thin wrapper for the DLL and button to place in SQL trace form.

This is the first version, it is very experimantal and tested under Ax 3 only.

PS. Some code was stealed from cs4 tool for BAAN

How to manage rights by code

Some times ago I nedd to copy 8 security groups and remove access to some menu items in these new copies. I wrote a job for that purpose and now I've placed it to axaptapedia here.

Using Mantis web service in Ax 3.0 via MSSOAP COM object

Just added a small example to Axaptapedia

Gantt

Gannt charts in Ax are displayed Netronic VARCHART XGantt ActiveX control. If you follow the link you can download CHM and PDF documentation (about 900 pages) on it...

new version of the DEV_CreateStandardsMethods extendion

The extension now can add suffix to created methods and is fully translated to english. For example parameters from the screenshot will lead to creation of findByGUID and existByGUID methods. See axaptapedia article for download and details.

Video: howto drag and drop nodes from XPO to application

watch it here

Tabax 0.3.2

download
Changes:

• AxPath: use of primary key of the record instead of recID
  
• French localization (thanx to Romain Gasnier)
  
• If tabax can not find it's resources on disk it tries to download them from Ax resources (useful for Ax 4 installations)

Unwanted fields fetching when selecting by unique index

UPD: Sorry, EmplTable is not good example - because of cache enabled. But this behavoiur is tested with a specially created table with CacheLookup==None.

Last friday i was optimizing a form with a lof of display fields with an implementation like the following:

display EmplName emplName()
{
 return EmplTable::find(this.EmplID).Name;
}

The one of sources to increase performance of such code is to select only fields which will be used lately. So I have replaced this code with the following:

display EmplName emplName()
{
 return this.EmplID ?
        (select Name from EmplTable
             where EmplTable.emplID==this.EmplID).Name
        :
        "";
}

but when I enabled SQL tracing, I found, that this code producess select with ALL fields of EmplTable.
It was strange... With a great help of my co worker, i've found the following:

• when there is only fields of any unique index in the where condition, all fields are fetched
  
• when there is an extra field in the condition, only required fields is selected (and the extra fields in where)
• So I converted previously mentioned methods to the following:
  

display EmplName emplName()
{
 return this.EmplID ?
        (select Name from EmplTable
             where EmplTable.emplID==this.EmplID
                     &&
                     EmplTable.recID
          ).Name
        :
        "";
}

TabaxLite

TabaxLite is a stripped down version of Tabax for end users.
It is focused solely on the window management and does not require any external component

Tabax v 0.3

download (87k)

After the long period of beta stage, the new release of Tabax is out.


This release introduces several new features which will be very useful for developers and end-users

First of all, it works under version 4 of Dynamics Ax.

Second, it introduces the Tabax Plugin API which allows developers to increase functionality of Tabax sufficiently.

There is a plugin for Tabax (in the tabax archive) to integrate AxPath with your system: so, if you install this plugin, you can click on AxPath links in browsers and email clients and go to specific location in code or specific record in the database (thank to AndyD for this functionality).

Ivan Kashperuk has developed a great plugin named RecentWindows which I use heavily. If you close some window, it allows to reopen it quickly.

Also, Ivan added a very useful feature to Tabax: if You press the 'Edit current field' toolbar button, while holding Ctrl and Shift down, Tabax will open a table field or data method related to the currently selected form field.

I have added similar fuctionality to the 'cross referebces' buton - now You can press it while working with form, and you will see cross refereces for the fireld related to the active control.

There are also some minor bugfixes and enhancements in this release

Infolog stack trace

This extension allows to see stacktrace of infolog items and navigate through call stack. read more @axaptapedia