In this chapter, we created our first document service in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Document services distinguish themselves from other types of services because they can be created using a wizard. This wizard creates components that are specific to document services and uses them in AIF.

In doing this, the AIF Document Service Wizard allows developers to create services that are capable of the Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations on complex documents. The advantage of using document services operations over other solutions such as creating data using SQL statements is that the business logic that is contained in all of the components that make up the service are also executed, such as defaulting and validation of values.

Document services are great for exposing documents, but not so much for exposing pure business logic. In the next chapter, we will discuss a type of service that is ideal for this purpose—custom services.