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Integrating Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 inherited tables with Connector for Microsoft Dynamics

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Several questions have been raised recently regarding how Connector for Microsoft Dynamics supports integrating data to and from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 inherited tables.  These tables normally are implemented similarly to how the DirParty tables are implemented in the base application and I will use Connector’s support for those tables as an example of how you can develop your integrations to your own inherited tables. 

Customers in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 can either be organizations or persons – each of which are concrete implementations of DirPartyType.  However at transformation time Connector does not get any Type information from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 other than the base type – DirPartyType so we do not know to which concrete type to cast instances of these objects to.  In order to support this polymorphic type we created our own ConnCustomerOrgService in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 that is installed as part of our XPO.  This service’s query is nearly identical to the
CustCustomerService that ships with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 but it restricts the DirPartyTypes returned to only be organizations and since we know this type at design time, we can list the type of these objects in the Conn Customer Service object configuration file as DirPartyOrganization and the transformation engine can successfully cast instances of these objects at runtime.  This does restrict us to only integrating customers of type organization out of the box, but customers are free to implement a copy of this service that would be restricted to just DirPartyPersons and then create new maps in Connector to integrate to and from this new service.  So if you have polymorphic types in your services (which I suspect is almost always the case with inherited tables) you’d need to implement a service for each of the concrete types, as we have done for Customers.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2013
    Hi thehetz,   After importing the 'Dynamics Connector R2.xpo', I am executing the main method of 'Dynamics Connector' class. The 'DynamicsConnectorDefaultServices' Port was not deployed successfully as shown in the infolog. There is an error with 'ConnCustomerOrgService'. i.e "The service 'ConnCustomerOrgService' could not be generated.n  Error: The schema was not found for the document 'ConnCustomerOrg' in port 'DynamicsConnectorDefaultServices' " I am stuck with this error for past few days. Can you please help me with this?

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2013
    @Yogesh - I would suggest contacting support or trying to re-post this in the Dynamics Communities, as this is something that I haven't encountered before.  Is it possible that you are trying to import the XPO into an instance of AX 2012 that already has CU 6 applied?  If so, then you do not need the XPO, all of its code was incorporated into the CU 6 update.

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2015
    hi thehetz, can you share the detail on how to implement a copy of this service that would be restricted to just DirPartyPersons and then create new maps in Connector to integrate to and from this new service. thank you very much...

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2015
    @siuchon - Take a look at the ConnCustomerOrgService.  I would suggest that you start by creating a new service, say ConnCustomerPersonService, that is a copy of the ConnCustomerOrgService but with the Person restriction instead of the Organization restriction.  Then you can publish this new service in the standard way and discover it using the Configuration utility within Connector for AX.