Relationship types in MS Dynamics AX2012

A very powerful feature has been added into AX2012 to maintain relationships between different party records in the form of parent child relations. One can access the relationship types form from Organization administration>Setup>Global address book>Relationship types. For example, if I have created a relationship type using the following information:

ID = Child, Party A type = Person, Party B type = Person, Relationship A to B = Child of, Relationship B to A = Parent of

I can now use this relationship while maintaining the Personal Contact information for an Employee record in HRM module. In the personal contacts form, I can specify a person who is the child of my employee. The system will allow you to define the relationship of this employee with contact person using the relationship type.

There are other application areas where relationship type can be used to define relationships between party records like GAB in Home module, Configure chart of accounts in GL etc.

Vendor master data upload using office add ins

I was having really hard time importing the vendor master records using office Adonis for AX2012. Also sent a query to Microsoft to find out how I can use out of box service VendVendTableService in Excel, but I got the feedback that unfortunately one cannot use this service as GAB services are not yet supported with add ins.

I then used the individual tables like DirPartyTable, LogisticsLocation, DirPartyLocation, DirPartyLocationRole, and VendTable in Excel. I also had to create replacement key in respective tables before I could have used them in Excel to populate with data.

After couple of hiccups, it worked really well for me and I was able to create a multiple records of Type "Person" and "Organization" in AX using Excel data publishing. I will try to compile a working document and publish it in my next post.

Management Reporter for MS Dynamics AX2012 - The operation could not be completed due to a failure on the server

If you have Windows Azure AppFabric SDK is installed on the machine where MR installed, the report designer gives error when trying to create a new company. The temporary solution is to uninstall the SDK. MR services are confused by the WSDL point that SDK adds into machine.config.

Please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2660994/en-us?sd=rss&spid=14927 for more details.