If you've worked with Microsoft Dynamics AX for a while, you will know that it contains many tables with a lot of data. These tables can be related to each other to form logical entities such as sales orders. Tables not only contain fields, indexes, and relations, but they also contain code that handles business logic such as initialization, validation, and manipulation of data. When you send data from Microsoft Dynamics AX, especially when you receive data from external systems, you want to make sure that all of the business logic contained in the tables and entities is executed so that the data is consistent. It would be troublesome to have to code all of this yourself when creating a service. Fortunately, AIF solves this problem by providing a framework and the tools to create these services.

So what are these tools and components? This is exactly what we will discuss next.