Doens.be

Me and some of my colleagues are currently working with a customer on a Ax 2009 SP1 RU4. The other day we came to the conclusion that the modified methods on fields in a form suddenly disappeared. I know, you should write as less as possible code on a form, but sometimes there is no way around this.

After some research we found a reproduction how these methods suddenly disappeared:

1. Go tot the AOT and chose a form
2. Open the [FORM] -> Data Sources -> [TABLE] -> Fields -> [A FIELD] -node
3. Add a method (for example the modified-method)
4. Save your form
5. Go to the properties of the table in the datasource
6. Place your cursor in the table property (properties window)
7. Push ENTER

The result is that the table will be reloaded in the form and all methods you created on the fields will be gone. So here you have another reason why you shouldn’t write lots of code on your forms. You can only lose it by accident.

I was using the postload method of the HRMBenefitType-table to fill the description-field with language-sensitive description (from LanguageTxt). This works fine when I view the record, but not when I use a lookup.

I’ve put a break-point on my postload method and noticed the recId (this.recid of the HRMBenefitType table). This is always the 101090. When I check this in the tablebrowser, this does not match the actual RecId valule.
I checked the SQL-trace-log and noticed the following instruction:

SELECT A.HRMBENEFITTYPEID,A.DESCRIPTION,A.RECVERSION,101090 FROM HRMBENEFITTYPE A WHERE (DATAAREAID=?) ORDER BY A.DATAAREAID,A.HRMBENEFITTYPEID OPTION(FAST 1)

The solution to this problem is simple. Just change the CacheLookup property to EntireTable and the strange behaviour of the RecId-field stops.

While I was checking my previous Enterprise Portal titlebar issue, me and my colleagues found a second bug. When you use a single quote (‘) in the PageTitle, the name of the Page Defenition object is displayed instead of the actual label with the singel quote. We couldn’t find a solution yet, but we’re still looking.

Anyone any idea?

When you modify the PageTitle property of a new Page Definition to a label with a ‘special’ character in it. You will see that the title is not rendered well. For example when you use a é it will be rendered as &#233. I logged this case with Microsoft and for the moment there is no fix for this issue, but they suggested a simple workaround.

Workaround:
When you edit your page in Sharepoint, you can remove the ‘Dynamics Page Title Web Part’ and replace it by the old ‘Page Title Web Part’

Explanation:
The reason why there are two Web Parts is mainly the “Page Title Web Part” is the old Web Framework (Dynamics AX 4.0) – and rendering takes part in X++ code while “Dynamics Page Title Web Part” is implemented completely in C#.

(Source: Microsoft)

Have you ever experienced the following symptoms in the Enterprise Portal:

• click on a date picker (the date picker is shown)
• click outside the date picker (the date picker is hidden)
• finally, you re-click on the date picker

Result: you see the message ‘Loading data’ and a ‘error on page’ message appears in the bottom of your browser.

When you open the error you will see a similar error:

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.2; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Timestamp: Thu, 18 Jun 2010 06:00:00 UTC

Message: Sys.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.

Parameter name: panelsDeleting[0]

Line: 4723

Char: 21

Code: 0

URI: http://dynamicsax/ScriptResource.axd?d=5kX_0LN0u7mwWn790LXsbY7Ctv1Hcwgr-zXRCNUAi2zkRoHYg1N1jlEUavJPzNwiZYTQiJ3dlxfzGp0UsvQxuKxp2przuGOLv2smzEfpZ-A1&t=ffffffff9b6540a0

Solution:
In the web.config file you will probably find a similar line: <compilation batch=”false” debug=”true“>. When you change the debug parameter to false (<compilation batch=”false” debug=”false“>) and execute a iisreset, this issue is solved. You will typically find this issue only in DEV-environments because debug should be turned off in a live environment.
Unfortunately Microsoft won’t create a Hotfix for Ax 2009 to solve this issue permanent. They ported the issue to Ax 6.0 and in the mean time we’ll have to use the work-around.

One of my colleagues (Koen Dedecker) was looking for a way to prevent user interaction with other forms while a certain dialog is shown. After some research he found the solution on the blog Dynamics AX tools and tutorials from Vanya Kashperuk. A few years ago (2007) he made a simple extension of the dialog class that makes this possible. You can find more information and download some code samples on http://kashperuk.blogspot.com/2007/06/3-dialog-extensions.html.

The trick is actually simple:

• Create a new variable of the type Boolean en the classDeclaration of the Dialog-class
• Create a public parm method for this new variable to get/set the value
• Extend the wait-method by placing the following code before the close-statement:

  dialogform.formRun().wait(this.parmShowModal());

Now when you make a new instance of the dialog class just set the value of the parmShowModal() to true. From now on this dialog will stay on top.

• When you declare a buffer of a record of temporary table type, the table does not contain any values.
• Memmory and filespace aren’t allocated for a temporary table till the first record is inserted. This means that you have to watch out for client/server problems.
  When the first record is inserted in a buffer on the client tier, the memory is allocated there. All actions (insert / update / delete) to this buffer will run trough that tier, so try to reduce round-trips and improve your performance.
• When you declare 2 different buffers of the same temporary table, they will both have a life of their own. To share the date between the tables use the setTmpData method.
  for example: tmpCommonBuffer1.setTmpData(tmpCommonBuffer2);
• You can’t (normally) set up logging on temporary tables.
• Use the method isTmp() to know if a record is temporary or not (true –> temporary, false –> phisical)

My opinion: Temporary tables are very useful and can help you to easily manipulate data you don’t need store permanently, but watch out where and how you use them.

Wel all know the small dialog that gives the user usefull information about what is happening in Ax. In this post I will tell u some more about this.

You can add information to the Infolog by calling:

• Infolog.add(…)
• info(…)
• warning(…) or checkfailed(…)
• error(…)
• You can add some structure in it by using setPrefix(…)
• Using the Proxy-class for the Enterprise Portal

(more…)

A few weeks ago I posted a link to all the TechDays 2010 sessions. There is one session I want to remark in special. The ‘Software Testing with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010‘ is a session about the new testing suite in Visual studio 2010 and it should be compatible with Microsoft Dynamics Ax, but I test it yet myself.

In one of my previous posts I explained that you can switch company with the keyword changecompany. I also made a remark that you should set the value of your table-value to null after each changecompany.

Small code example (bad):

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DataArea dataArea;
PurchTable purchTable;
;
while select dataArea
where !dataArea.isVirtual
{
    changecompany(dataArea.id)
    {
        select firstonly purchTable;
        info(strfmt("%1 (%2)", purchTable.purchId, purchTable.dataAreaId));
    }
}

The result is:

You can clearly see that the table variable is is known in the company you declared it.

Small code example (good):

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DataArea dataArea;
PurchTable purchTable;
;
while select dataArea
where !dataArea.isVirtual
{
    changecompany(dataArea.id)
    {
        purchTable = null;
        select firstonly purchTable;
        info(strfmt("%1 (%2)", purchTable.purchId, purchTable.dataAreaId));
    }
}

The result:

So by making this small code change it runs perfectly.

NOTE: When you are calling a new method in the changecompany statement, you don’t have to set all the common variables that you declare  equal to ‘null’. This because they are declared after the companychange.