AX 2012 Data Migration Framework (beta) Configuration and Execution

Using the data migration tool is fairly simple; however, an understanding of different business entities and their data model is highly required to successfully migrate the data.

In this post, I will take a sample scenario to walk through the configuration and setup of data migration framework. We will consider couple of entities to migrate the data. Let’s assume that we need to migrate customer master data from a source system to AX 2012. Follow these steps to achieve the objective:

Navigate to Data Migration Framework module in AX 2012 application workspace. Open Setup>Target entities form.

The target entities out of the box available are listed in this form. You can select an entity and modify its staging to target mapping if you would like to (in case you have customizations in AX). Here, we are going with what is available out of the box. You can also validate the mapping after modifying it, view the target entity hierarchy, and target fields for any selected entity. You can also create a new record for a custom target entity.

Now we have to define the data format for our source data. Open Source data formats from Setup area and create a new record as shown below:

I have selected File format as Delimited with first row as header and values are separated with comma. Also marked the source file to be Unicode. It is often the case that primary entity might have multiple sub records associated with it. For example, a customer might have two addresses. In such situation, you can use the Role Separator to distinguish these multiple records.

Now the next step is to create processing group (Common>Processing group) for customer data migration. By definition, processing group is a logical grouping of entities that need to be imported in sequential order.

 

Add the entities into the processing group.

At this point, let’s use the generate source file wizard to generate the source customer file for import. You can also create your own source file as per the format specified in Source data formats.

Click Next. On the screen below, you have the option to only use the fields present in source for customer import or include other fields.

Click Generate sample file and the wizard will provide you a file as shown below. Save the file in a folder as later we will need to refer to that location.

Once the file is generated and saved, put some data in it and provide its location in the Sample file path field.

Our next step is to generate the source to staging mapping. Note that you get the infolog “Mapping has completed successfully”. At this point, you can also modify the source to staging mapping. In our case, we don’t have to.

Target mapping with corresponding staging table can also be viewed. You also have the option to run the business logic or validations in entity’s insert update or validateWrite methods at the time of import. Data preview for staging table can also be analyzed in the preview pane. This is how the data will look like in the staging table.

Next step is to push the data from source file to staging table.

A dialog will appear with auto generated job Id. Click OK and Staging data execution screen will appear.

Click Run. You can also run this job on AOS if you would like to. You can also preview the staging data here. After the job is executed, an infolog will appear mentioning that a record has been successfully created in the staging table.

Once the data is in staging table, it just the matter of pushing it to target (AX) entity’s table.

A dialog will appear asking for the job that was executed previously to push the data from source to staging. Select ‘Customer-6’ in this case.

Click OK. Target data processing screen will appear.

Click Run. After the job is executed, an infolog will appear mentioning the record is created in the target entity.

You can cross verify in ‘CustTable’ and corresponding staging table ‘DMFCustomerEntity’ for customer entity.

The framework gives really cool feature of exception logging. You can see any errors that might have occurred during the source-staging or staging-target job execution.

With this I close the post and hope it will give you a kick start leveraging other really powerful features of DMF.