Some times ago someone asks me if it possible to open form in running Dynamics Ax application with external code. He don’t want to use AxPath for some reason.
I recalled there is a similar thing in Ax (since version 4.0) – when you receive an event alert message you can click an a link and go to the corresponding alert.
The idea was to reuse alert handling code as much as possible. And I achieved that without changing Ax code at all.
How alert links work?
1. When you start Ax32.exe, it runs the EventDrillDownPoller class, that creates a named pipe with name like “Dynamics\Event\0S-1-5-5-0-686394” (you can use pipelist utility from the SysInternals suite to obtain exact name of your named pipe) where
You can look at \Classes\EventDrillDownPoller\scheduledPoll code to see the details.
2. When you click on the link in e-mail, axhlink.exe protocol handler is executed, it parses url and connects the named pipe obtaining it’s name using “Drill down target” from url and current session id. Then it writes a command to the named pipe.
3. When timeout handler (which was subscribed to the times in 1.) detects there is a new message in the pipe, it just runs a SysStartupCmd and then recreates a named pipe (see \Classes\EventDrillDownPoller\scheduledPoll – unfortunately it uses the current company to detect a drill down target, so if you have different values of the field in different companies ad user changes the current company, you can see it recreating a named pipe with a different name – it can cause mistakes)
So the task is pretty simple
Contents:
I recalled there is a similar thing in Ax (since version 4.0) – when you receive an event alert message you can click an a link and go to the corresponding alert.
The idea was to reuse alert handling code as much as possible. And I achieved that without changing Ax code at all.
How alert links work?
1. When you start Ax32.exe, it runs the EventDrillDownPoller class, that creates a named pipe with name like “Dynamics\Event\0S-1-5-5-0-686394” (you can use pipelist utility from the SysInternals suite to obtain exact name of your named pipe) where
- Dynamics\Event\ – is a constant prefix
- 0 – is a value from the “Drill Down target” field in the “Basic\Setup\Alert\Alert parameters” form
- S-1-5-5-0-686394 – is a user system session ID
You can look at \Classes\EventDrillDownPoller\scheduledPoll code to see the details.
2. When you click on the link in e-mail, axhlink.exe protocol handler is executed, it parses url and connects the named pipe obtaining it’s name using “Drill down target” from url and current session id. Then it writes a command to the named pipe.
3. When timeout handler (which was subscribed to the times in 1.) detects there is a new message in the pipe, it just runs a SysStartupCmd and then recreates a named pipe (see \Classes\EventDrillDownPoller\scheduledPoll – unfortunately it uses the current company to detect a drill down target, so if you have different values of the field in different companies ad user changes the current company, you can see it recreating a named pipe with a different name – it can cause mistakes)
So the task is pretty simple
- Create an autorun startup command configuration file
- Connect to the named pipe using session id and provided drill down target
- Write a zero terminated Unicode string with a startup command to the pipe
Contents:
- C# sources of sending a message (command line utility that takes startup command and drop target ID)
- XML file example
- XPO with modification for autorun startup command code, adding a parameter to navigate to a specific record (that was additional requirement – it takes table and recID attributes)
