Dynamics AX – OppoverBakke

Dynamics AX 2012 – Managing duplicate model names

Recently I came across a situation where I had multiple models with the same name in one of the AX 2012 instances I am developing for. It is possible to do this through the AX developer workspace as long as they have different publishers, but it causes the model management Powershell cmdlets to freak out a bit.

In my case, I wanted to delete one of the models so I would not have duplicate names, but when I tried to use Uninstall-AXModel, I got an error message saying:

 uninstall-axmodel : The pipeline has been stopped.
 At line:1 char:1
 uninstall-axmodel -server DEVSRV -database DynamicsAX_Dev_model -m …
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CategoryInfo          : OperationStopped: (:) [Uninstall-AXModel], PipelineStoppedException
 FullyQualifiedErrorId : Multiple models exist with the name temp.,Microsoft.Dynamics.AX.Framework.Tools.ModelManagement.PowerShell.UninstallAXModelCommand

Fix: Dynamics AX windows opening up behind everything else

If you have worked with Dynamics AX 2009, 2012, R2 or R3 for a while, at least more than an hour or so, you’ll have noticed that for some reason it tends to open new windows behind everything else.

You click a button to open a form, and then you wait for a while for the form to open. Then you wait some more, and a bit more again. And then you finally notice that the form has actually opened already. AX just decided to play a bit of hide and seek with you and opened it behind everything else.

Brilliant design decision, that…

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Adding a colour picker lookup to an AX form

Here’s a quick and easy way to add a colour picker lookup to an AX form.

I’ve seen a number of different ways to add colour picker support to an AX form, but so far, this has been the easiest. It is not ideal, because the colour picker opens up as a dialog window, something which can’t be easily worked around without resorting to using custom ActiveX or .NET controls.

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Filtered form reference group lookup

Dynamics AX 2012 introduces built-in support for resolving and looking up linked records based on reference record IDs.

When adding a reference record ID field to a form, AX will add a reference group control instead of the reference record ID, and will show a selected set of fields from the referenced table. See the posts about tree lookups for an example.

The reference group control also does lookups into the referenced table for selecting a new value. However, by default this lookup is not filtered and will show all records in the referenced table. Adding filtering is quite easy to do and it follows a similar pattern as regular table lookups.

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toolTipField() method not working

According to best practices, data-related code that accesses data from the database or otherwise would benefit multiple forms should be placed on the table. Examples of this are display methods, validations and business logic to be executed on inserts, updates, deletes.

It would be logical to think tool tips would be included as well, and there is a record method called toolTipField() which can be overridden in your table.

Only problem is, it’s not working. (At least not in 2012R3) The code doesn’t even get called.

To work around it, add the tool tip code directly to your forms instead. Not best practice according to the book, but what works will always trump what doesn’t…