AX 2012 Archives - Page 5 of 12

Hardcoded label fix tool for AX 2012

It is a common problem that developers create the objects and code in the shortest time possible to meet a deadline, and that is when we meet with the hardcoded label problem, which is a Best Practice violation. Our environment had about 6000 hardcoded label values as well, and I was looking for a general solution to fix them, which resulted in creating a new tool.

This tool is heavily beta version, comes with no warranties, use it at your own risk.

The hardcoded label fix tool is version control compatible, and you should really use it through that, in case you would like to roll back a set of incorrect modifications easily.

Once you open the form, the Scan button will process your entire AOT on the current layer and model and stores TreeNode path, type, text and possible label matches. Processing can take up to several hours.

Then you could multi-select labels and press Commit to replace the values. For blank entries it tries to create a new label in the currently selected (must be checked out in advance!) label file and language. If there are multiple hits for the text, it is marked by 3 asterisks, and you need to pick one on the right pane to use. In case you want to have your own labels created anyway, you could erase the recommended @SYS* or whatever entries, save the record then commit for a new one.

Please note that due to the nature of AX DB being Case Insensitive, it is possible that a label is recommended which has a different case, like you get label for ‘a’ instead of ‘A’.

The project can be downloaded from the DAXRunBase GitHub.

By DAXRunBase|2018-03-30T13:54:33+02:00March 30th, 2018|Categories: AX 2012|Tags: AX 2012, fix, label, X++, XPO|1 Comment

Picking list registration performance

We recently have implemented a new Picking application in our warehouse. Our slow performing statement e-mail has immediately highlighted that with our data volume the WMSOrder and SalesTable records were underperforming, taking 5+ seconds each time when the form was opened (close to 20). We needed to fix the Picking list registration performance.

WMSOrder

Apparently it is a standard AX form and table, but the link which they have been using is incorrectly defined, resulting in an InnerJoin for SalesTable unnecessarily.

Picking list registration performance

Also the field used for the join has no index, you should create one for WMSOrder.InventTransRefId to gain more performance.

After the adjustment it looks much better and performs really fast:

WMSOrder

By DAXRunBase|2018-02-27T10:22:18+01:00February 27th, 2018|Categories: AX 2012|Tags: AX 2012, performance, SQL, statements, tables, X++|0 Comments

SQL data compression for Dynamics AX 2012 (Part 2)

It has been a while since I have touched up on SQL data compression in part 1 on my blog. It is time to re-visit the topic.

SQL data compression for Dynamics AX 2012 (Part 1)

Since that post Microsoft has published an excellent series of articles on how to apply compression within AX, or directly on SQL Server. It is a must-read blog post for everyone, so start there:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/axinthefield/sql-server-data-compression-for-dynamics-ax-0-blog-series/

Since JJ Food Service has a very large database, we have started applying compression to Production AX. Our SalesLine and CustInvoiceTrans has been between 250-350 GB size each! Our approach was to apply compression before a maintenance window using the Enterprise Edition license of SQL Server in ONLINE mode and using TempDB sorting, so it was running during business hours only adding a slight overhead to the system (mostly as disk I/O). It took 4 and 6 hours respectively, and space saving was more than 75% which is excellent.

Once the compression has finished and we were about to begin our regular Friday night maintenance, once the AX AOS, reporting and web services were all down, we could run the post-compression SQL script provided by Microsoft to populate the SQLStorage table. This is required for the Data dictionary synchronization step to recognize compressed indexes, so it would not drop and recreate them uncompressed.

Eventually we will consider compressing our whole database for Page level. The reason being is that Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition in the background uses full page compression for the whole AX database. If you would like to use the upgrade scripts from 2012, even the documentation mentions that compression is a pre-requisite step:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/dev-itpro/migration-upgrade/prepare-data-upgrade

As a result we have seen great performance boost for the tables involved and much lower numbers in the slow performing SQL statements, since more data could be kept in the SQL memory buffer.

By DAXRunBase|2018-02-27T09:45:41+01:00February 27th, 2018|Categories: AX 2012, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations|Tags: AX 7, compression, Dynamics 365, migration, performance, SQL|0 Comments

Add call stack to InfoLog messages

The main communication channel for our ERP users in case we want to tell them something is via the InfoLog messages within Microsoft Dynamics AX. In case we get an error or a warning, the technical staff does not receive the details required to troubleshoot the issue much easier. In this post I would like to show you how to send the X++ or .Net CIL call stack to InfoLog messages.
Microsoft already has an article on this for AX 2009, but that was before the AX 2012 IL code execution for server-side code, so it needs slight adjustments.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/axsupport/2010/08/02/how-to-send-the-callstack-to-the-infolog/

My changes got the following improvements:

Can handle X++ and CIL execution.
Users only see the call stack when clicking the message line due to filling it with whitespace.
Specific users could be excluded from receiving the call stack, we are doing this for our service accounts such as the batch execution account. We are also excluding our eCommerce portal customers from seeing a call stack, which are the Claims-based users.
Current database server/name and user account is included in the message, in case we are storing the errors in the Event log and would like to know who had the problem.

Here is the example output:

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By DAXRunBase|2020-03-23T13:50:07+01:00July 20th, 2017|Categories: AX 2012|Tags: alerts, AX 2012, call stack, GitHub, InfoLog, X++, XPO|0 Comments

Troubleshooting batch jobs in AX

If your batch jobs are seemingly not executing in Microsoft Dynamics AX, there could be a multitude of reasons. This guide will help with troubleshooting batch jobs in AX by listing the possible causes and providing solutions for each points.

Initial setup

It is important to define what is a batch job first:

A batch job is a process which will carry out specific tasks at a certain date and time running as a background process within the AX Application Object Server service.

We need to tell the system what is the process that we want execute, which consists of a Batch job as a header, and at least one Batch task which is the actual processes running. The batch jobs can be grouped together by their roles with the help of a Batch group. If none is provided, it would still classify as one called the “Empty batch group”.

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By DAXRunBase|2017-09-25T19:51:42+02:00July 2nd, 2017|Categories: AX 2012|Tags: AX 2012, batch jobs, compile, debug, kernel, users|1 Comment