Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations Cookbook

By : Simon Buxton

Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations Cookbook

By: Simon Buxton

Overview of this book

Dynamics 365 for Operations is the ERP element of Microsoft’s new Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition. Operations delivers the infrastructure to allow businesses to achieve growth and make better decisions using scalable and contemporary ERP system tools. This book provides a collection of “recipes” to instruct you on how to create—and extend—a real-world solution using Operations. All key aspects of the new release are covered, and insights into the development language, structure, and tools are discussed in detail. New concepts and patterns that are pivotal to elegant solution designs are introduced and explained, and readers will learn how to extend various aspects of the system to enhance both the usability and capabilities of Operations. Together, this gives the reader important context regarding the new concepts and the confidence to reuse in their own solution designs. This “cookbook” provides the ingredients and methods needed to maximize the efficiency of your business management using the latest in ERP software—Dynamics 365 for Operations.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Free Chapter

Starting a New Project

Introduction

Creating the Visual Studio Team Services project

Connecting Visual Studio to Visual Studio Team Services

Creating a new Model and Packages

Configuring project and build options

Creating a Label file

Data Structures

Introduction

Creating enumerated types

Creating extended data types

Creating setup tables

Creating a parameter table

Creating main data tables

Creating order header tables

Creating order line tables

Creating the User Interface

Introduction

Creating the menu structure

Creating a parameter form

Creating menu items

Creating setup forms

Creating details master (main table) forms

Creating a details transaction (order entry) form

Creating form parts

Create tiles with counters for the workspace

Creating a workspace

Application Extensibility, Form Code-Behind, and Frameworks

Introduction

Creating a handler class using the Application Extension factory

Hooking up a number sequence

Creating a create dialog for details transaction forms

Creating a SysOperation process

Adding an interface to the SysOperation framework

Business Intelligence

Introduction

Creating aggregate dimensions

Creating aggregate measures

Creating aggregate data entities

Creating and using key performance indicators

Security

Introduction

Creating privileges

Creating duties

Creating security roles

Creating policies

Leveraging Extensibility

Introduction

Extending standard tables without customization footprint

Creating data-event handler methods

How to customize a document layout without an over-layer

Creating event handler methods

Extending standard forms without customization footprint

Using a form event handler to replace a lookup

Creating your own query functions

Data Management, OData, and Office

Introduction

Creating a data entity

Extending standard data entities

Importing data through Data Import/Export Framework

Reading, writing, and updating data through OData

Consuming and Exposing Services

Introduction

Creating a service

Consuming a Dynamics 365 for Operations SOAP service

Consuming a Dynamics 365 for Operations JSON service

Consuming an external service within Dynamics 365 for Operations

Extensibility Through Metadata and Data Date-Effectiveness

Introduction

Using metadata for data access

Using Interfaces for extensibility through metadata

Making data date-effective

Unit Testing

Introduction

Creating a Form Adaptor project

Creating a Unit Test project

Creating a Unit Test case for code

Creating a test case from a task recording

Automated Build Management

Introduction

Creating a Team Services Build Agent Queue

Setting up a build server

Managing build operations

Releasing a build to User Acceptance Testing

Servicing Your Environment

Introduction

Applying metadata fixes

Applying binary updates

Servicing the build server

Servicing the Sandbox - Standard Acceptance Test environment

Workflow Development

Introduction

Creating a workflow type

Creating a workflow approval

Creating a manual workflow task

Hooking up a workflow to the user interface

Creating a sample workflow design

State Machines

Introduction

Creating a state machine

Creating a state machine handler class

Using menu items to control a state machine

Hooking up the state machine to a workflow

Customer Reviews

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Connecting Visual Studio to Visual Studio Team Services

Each developer has their own development VM, hosted either in Azure or locally. This is by design and is part of the application lifecycle process. Each developer would get the latest code from source control, and then check in their changes according their organization's development methodology. As part of this check in they can link the check-ins. This allows a build to then be created, and we gain a level of traceability since each work item (user story, feature, bug, and so on.) is linked to the check-ins in that build. This also allows test projects to be automatically executed when the build is generated.

Getting ready

Once the virtual machine has started, ensure that it has Internet access, and that you have used the admin user provisioning tool to associate your O365 account with the administrator account of Operations.

Before you start this, especially when working in a team, we must rename the VM to make it unique across our team; see the There's more... section for details on this.

How to do it...

To connect Visual Studio to VSTS, follow these steps:

Create a folder for your projects, and underneath a subfolder with your initials, or others that make the folder unique, within your team; in my example, I chose C:ProjectsTFS.
Start Visual Studio.
You will be presented with the licensing page. Use the page to log in to the account used to create the project within VSTS. Which could be either your Microsoft account, or Work (O365) account.
On the top toolbar, select Team and then Manage connections.
The Team Explorer will open, under default layout, on the right-hand side. On this pane, select Manage Connections | Connect to Team Project:

This will open the Connect to Team Foundation Server dialog, in the Select a Team Foundation Server drop-down list and select your VSTS site.
Select your project in the lower portion of the dialog, as shown in the following screenshot:

After pressingConnect, Visual Studio is connected to your project.
We have one final step before we continue; we have to configure our workspace so Visual Studio knows which folders are under source control and how they map to VSTS. On Team Explorer, click on Configure workspace under the Project section. This will show the Configure Workspace section at the top of the Team Explorer.

Do not press Map & Get.
Press Advanced....
The Edit Workspace dialog will look similar to the following screenshot:

For Operations development, we will need to map a projects folder and the Operations local packages folder (the application source code, or metadata as it is often referred to) to two different folders in VSTS. The Projects folder is the one we created earlier, which was C:ProjectsSB in my case. The Operations local packages folder is C:AOSServicePackagesLocalDirectory.

If you look around the local packages folder, you can see how the relationship between package and Model is actually stored.

In my case, the project is B05712_AX7_DevelopmentCookbook, so I will configure the dialog as shown in the following screenshot:

Press OK.
You will then be told that the workspace has been modified, and if you want to get the latest code. Either option has no effect if we are the first developer, but it is a good habit to always press Yes.

How it works...

Source control in Operations has come a long way in this release, mainly because our development tool is now Visual Studio and that the source files are now actual files in the file system. Operations no longer needs special code to integrate with a Team Foundation Server.

The reason we have two folders is that our projects don't actually contain the files we create when writing code. When we create a file, such as a new class, it is created within the local packages folder and referenced with in the project. This also means that we can't just zip up a project and e-mail it to a co-worker. This is done by connecting to the same VSTS project or using a project export feature.

There's more...

When working with multiple developers, one often overlooked task is to rename the virtual machine. This has gotten easier with each update, and the steps we take at the current release are as follows:

Use Computer management to rename the machine. Use something like project ID and your initials for this; for example, B05712SB.
Restart the virtual machine.
Use the SQL Server Reporting Services configuration utility so that it references the correct server name.

Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations Cookbook

By : Simon Buxton

Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations Cookbook

By: Simon Buxton

Overview of this book

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