Streamline installations
Streamline installations are supposed to make our lives easy, that is if they are properly configured.
First question is how to make a streamline installation. These can be downloaded from https://lcs.dynamics.com
One has to create a project. It is important that it is for the correct build (RTM, retail, R2 or R3).
Next, scroll to the right on the LCS site. On the More tools plane, one can find 2 important buttons: Issue search and Update.
Issue search makes it possible to download isolated fixes (KB numbers).
The updates button allows you to download whole CU updates. When you press the Updates button, the webpage below appears.
The first option (Complete) has it all, namely an installation wizard, binaries and model store. This can also be used in case one only wants to install the binaries.
If only the binaries and the installation wizard are needed, choose the next option (Binary-only)
And finally we come to the third option (Slipstream). The Slipstream has no installation wizard. When this is extracted, one gets something as per the screenshot below:
These extracted files are to be copied to the correct place on the AX 2012 R2 RTM image. Remember to extract this image first.
When the image is extracted, one can find an Updates folder. Open this folder and create folders CU8 and myModels inside as show below:
Next copy the extracted CU8 files into the CU8 folder and copy your own models in myModels.
One would think that the slipstream installation is now up and running….. NOT!
This is strange, this is CU8, so what went wrong?
Time to check LCS….. check for CU8 or slipstream but we find no answer.
Time to log an incident on connect.microsoft.com. An update will follow….
But there is more to this, even when you have correct CU patches, one can still run in issues. It looks like the order of importing the models is wrong. Last week my model had a dependency on the upgrade model.
The dependency was correct, but seems like the size of some field on upgrade staging tables have been changed. When I slipstream this particular installation, my model is rejected because the upgrade (SYS) model is not there.
Time to log another incident…
Conclusion, don’t slipstream in both AX 2012 R2 CU8 and AX2012 R3 CU8
DMF
Yes just a new post about DMF, not really about how it works, just an update on the latest know issues.
What you have to know:
- DMF AX2012 R2 and higher the staging table MUST have an one on one relation to the target Table.
- The menu item you select in the DMF wizard. Is for jumping from the staging table form to the target Ax Form.
- DMF wizard sometimes duplicate the table cache setting of the target table, in case of entire table cache, DMF will fail.
- In case your records have a refrecid to a record in the same table, DMF will not be able to do the job, (Chicken and his egg, what was first.)
- Add the natural keys of the related tables (where a refrecid is pointing to) to the staging table and write the replacement code yourself. Good examples are
- DMFBomEntityClass for InventDim fields
- DMFBomVersionEntityClass for HRMworkers (generate Approver)
- Running DMF not in Batch can be debugged with the AX debugger.
- DMF staging Tables use labels and not the value, so If you are running in EN-US and your customer in NL-NL, trust me it will not work out.
- DMF data is company independent but your target ax tables not, be Shure that you run them in the correct company.
- Import and export your DMF settings. DMF framework uses no refrecid add all so create a definition group
- And on the end remove all tables that do no start with ‘DMF’
- Create a clean start, in below example the table ending on Entity where my staging tables
AX2012 R2 CU7
- In AX 2012 R2CU7 the labels are missing, you can correct this by importing the labels from AX 2012R2 older ones.
- Don’t forget to remove these label files when you upgrade to CU8.
delete an AX 2012 R2 or R3 partition
We are able to delete a company in AX, but deleting a partition is not possible.
So why not? It should be easy to create a partition and put data in it with tools like DMF, to enable us to create ad hoc demo / training partitions. Having played for a while with some SQL code, the following code was obtained.
First browse the partitions table to find the RecId of the partition one wants to delete.
The script below contains SQL code to delete PS, EXT and Cube partitions.
Be careful don’t delete the initial partition or a partition with production data. Also note that it will not ask for a confirmation when you run this script. I would strongly recommend you to create a backup of the database before running this.
This script is ‘as-is’. There are no guarantee on this code. I you use it, test it carefully. The results are your responsibility.
It is also possible to delete a company in AX 2012, however you have to delete first all transactions with class sysDatabaseTransDelete (see also http://daxture.blogspot.nl/2014/09/delete-legal-entities-in-ax-2012.html)
As a side not, cleaning up the partition on the Contoso demo data will not reduce the size of your database.
Change in Data import export framework – AX 2012 R3
Since the initial beta release of the Data Import/Export Framework, I was very pleased with the tool. During the years Microsoft did some great additional investments on this framework to help us import, export and migrate data using Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. In this post I will inform you on a change that I experienced recently.