Draining the AOS

One thing that has always plagued me is when to do system maintenance in AX. I am talking "full blown, kick all the users out" system maintenance. It seems like there is always someone who wants to be working!

I would try to schedule downtime during the standard lunch hour, sending an email alerting people to the potential for downtime. Too many users work through lunch or take later lunches, so my suggestion of running to the local Mexican restaurant fell flat. Sometimes, users just didn't see my company-wide email that I had sent earlier in the day about the upcoming downtime. I also tried to take down the AOS after office hours. That didn't work either because many users always want to be logged in to AX.

Basically, it came down to the fact that I felt like I was always completely inconveniencing someone when I would start system maintenance. I would start getting calls of, "What's wrong with AX?" or "Did someone kick me out?" I just couldn't win!

Me, over here like "Why are you working at 11:00 pm?"

My Wonderful Accidental Discovery

Horse Race in AX

As many of you may know, I work and reside in beautiful Louisville, Kentucky. One of the best parts of living in this city is that on the first Saturday in May, we host a small gathering of our closest 150,000 friends called the Kentucky Derby. For those of you not familiar with the Kentucky Derby, it's a horse race that's been hailed "the most exciting two minutes in sports."

I got to spend some time at the track this week.

AX Word of the Week: X++

In my AX Word of the Week post last week on the AOT, I briefly mentioned the code in AX that developers work with to make the system work as intended. Well, that programming language, X++, is the AX Soup Word of the Week!

X++

X++ is the AX programming language, and is most similar to the programming language C#.

Number Sequences: The Building Block of AX Transactions

One thing that is easily overlooked as one of the basic building blocks of all transactions within AX is the number sequence. A poorly built number sequence will cause headaches, confusion, and unnecessary stress.

A Number sequence in AX is set up so that records requiring identifiers can have unique identifiers that are easy to understand tied to them. They are typically tied to transactional records and master data.

Number Sequence Information in AX

Number sequences are set up in the Organization administration module under Organization administration > Common > Number sequences. There are unique number sequences for each company within your organization, so there is a possibility that you have hundreds, or even thousands, of number sequences set up in your AX environment.

This is just the beginning of the list in my demo environment. There are 23,384 unique number sequences set up for 24 demo companies.

AX Word of the Week: AOT

The AX Word of the Week this week is AOT, another acronym! Not to be confused with last week's word of the week, AOS, the AOT is quite different.

AOT - Application Object Tree

The AOT, or the Application Object Tree, is the back end of your AX environment. This is where all of the code, the tables, and all of the objects defined in AX reside. Typically, you will hear a developer or a system administrator talk about the AOT. The typical AX user does not have access to the AOT, so this blog post will be a very high level overview of what the AOT is. This will be helpful for the next time you hear someone talking about it, you might be able to hang with the conversation a little bit longer.

AOT Structure in AX

Logging in as a Different User

A great tip to help users when they have to switch between logins, whether testing user functionality or working with another user on training, is the Run as different user function. There are many different reasons why you may want to log in as a different user. Your coworker or manager might want to log in from your PC and show you something or make a quick change to something that was posted incorrectly. It's always a best practice to work from your own login when in AX so that the records you touch in the system are tied to your username, but there will always be circumstances where it would be convenient to have another user log in to AX from your specific instance.

A typical installation of AX will have users set up as Active Directory authenticated. This means that when you log in to your work network with your username and password, your AX login will be automatically authenticated. This is great for ease of use and not having to enter your password every time you want to open AX (especially if you accidentally close AX a lot - we all do it!).

Run as Different User

AX Date Shortcuts - More Interesting Than You Think!

My last post, AX Is Better at Math Than I Am, sparked some interesting conversations on social media and in person. Most of it ended up being about the hidden games in AX, but one reader mentioned the date shortcuts as something that people really like to use. I thought that was worthy of a short post, so here goes!

Quick Date Formatting - AX is Still Pretty Smart

Anywhere you can put a date in AX, you can enter it many ways. AX is pretty smart and will try to figure out what your entry means. For example, today's date is January 24, 2017. I have found that I can enter it as any of the following and AX will give me 1/24/2017 in my field:

Hide Unwanted Modules

When you look at the module list in AX, it can seem very large and overwhelming, especially if you only touch one or two modules in the system as part of your daily tasks. You may long for a way to hide some of these extra modules that you never use just to clear up some screen real estate and make system navigation easier on yourself. Well, I bring good news! Hiding modules in AX is extremely easy to do and anyone can do it.

Hiding Unused Modules in AX

Navigate from any screen to File > View > Modules. From there, a full list of all modules in AX will open up and you will see most, if not all, checked.

Automatic Clean Up of Alerts

Alerts in AX can be a beautiful thing, but sometimes unused alerts can be ignored and build up in the system's EventInbox, causing issues and system latency if it gets too out of hand. You might have a problem when you are looking at someone's PC and they have 14,236 unread alerts in AX. Do not fear though! There is always an answer to these types problems and I have come across a beauty that I am going to share.

Alerts are something that your System Administrator should be cleaning up on a regular basis in System administration > Periodic > Notification clean up. This opens a notification clean-up tool that will clean alerts from every user's alert inbox when it is run. 

An issue arises when the System Administrator goes to run the clean-up tool and if they clean it out as of right this minute, someone might miss an important alert. So the System Administrator has to set up some parameters of when it might be appropriate to clean up alerts and how far back they need to go. 

When I first started cleaning up alerts in my AX environment, I had a reminder in my calendar to clean up alerts every Friday and I would set it with the following parameter so that it would clean up alerts from three weeks prior and older. 

Imagine I am running this today to clean up everything older than three weeks in EventInbox.

This was working pretty well until I stumbled upon this gem in MSDN and put it into place: