Dynamics AX Development Projects: Making Organization Easy
Organizing, is it important? I suppose it depends on who you ask, and under what circumstances are we talking. In terms of development, being organized is a must. Of course, how you organize all depends on the project itself and what we're trying to accomplish. Here are a few tips for AX development projects and making organization easy.
AOT projects window
Dynamics AX's development workspace helps the developer maintain and organize their development. One of my favorite things about the AOT is the projects' window. You can get there by Ctrl - Shift - P, within this window you'll find 2 folders: private, and public. Depending if you want others to be able to view your project or not will help determine what folder you need to start from.
Creating a new project
To start a new project, right-click select new project. Name your project something useful. For example, if you are fixing a bug, a great name for your project may be the bug number or name. Organizing your code in projects for bugs allow you and others reviewing your code to easily see what you changed for that bug.
Creating new groups
Your Project folder is now the root AOT. The extensiveness of your bug would determine if you need to add multiple tables, classes, forms, extended data types, etc. If your project requires multiple instances of an object type, I would recommend creating a new group first. For example, let's say you need to create 3 forms for your project. In your project folder, right-click AOT, select new > group. In the properties window (Alt - Enter), set the ProjectGroupType property to Forms, and set the name property to Forms. This will create a new group, named Forms in your AOT that you can only add new Forms to it, to add a new form: right-click, select New > Form. What a great way to organize your forms for this project.
When creating groups, you can create any type of group that is available in the AOT. This not only helps organize your various object types, this also groups all of the objects you changed for your project, or this case a bug. This has many benefits, undoubtedly one of the most important, it groups all of your changes. Not only does this allow you to locate your changes faster, but it allows others who may need to fix a bug in your bug understand what was done originally. Obviously, the larger the project this type of organization becomes a lot of more important.
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