Importing Product Masters into Dynamics AX 2012 using DIEF | DIXF | DMF | – Uncovered
I’ve heard and seen mixed practices on how to import product masters into Dynamics AX 2012 and their variants. The intent of this article is that you can import product masters and product using the same DIEF entity and to provide you with some information and templates on how to import products, product masters, and their variants.
Contrary to popular belief, it only takes two DIXF data entities to import both products, product masters, and their variants and release them.
Here are the data entities:
1. Product Entity – Imports and releases a product or product master
2. Variant Entity – Imports the variants for specific product masters.
Below are the fields I used in the import templates that I created for both entities:
NOTE: In my variant example the only product dimension I was using was style. If you need more add more product dimensions.
NOTE: Some of the fields that are marked as required aren’t required by a specific underlying table. They are marked as required because if you want things to work right in AX downstream, the required fields are the ones you’ll want to fill in. Example: Item Group.
Also, note the following observations:
1. IsVariantGenerationEnabled* - This field we’ll always want to mark with a value of “YES” for Product Masters. So when we import variants they are automatically released. If you don’t do this, you’ll find you’ll import variants but you’ll still have to run through the release process.
2. Prior to importing, in general, you’ll want to get the latest hotfixes in place for the Product Entity and Variant Entity. Having the latest code will save you a lot of time troubleshooting bogus errors.
a. The primary error I was running into when importing variants was: "Cannot create a record in Product Variant – dimension Values (EcoResProductVariantDimensionValue). Product Variant: 0, 100605. The record already exists."
To get the proper code, what I did was find an AX 2012 R3 CU11 environment and export the following objects and import them into the environment I was working on:
a. Classes\DMFProductVariantEntityClass
b. Classes\DMFProductEntityClass
c. Tables\DMFProductVariantEntity
d. Tables\DMFProductEntity
Example Import
Below are two files that can be imported into the USMF company of the Contoso demo data set as an example import.
Product-Example_Template.xlsx (2997 downloads )
Product-Variant-Example_Template.xlsx (3008 downloads )
I’m not going to walk through the import process, but if you want to know more you can take a look at this article for the process on how to use DIEF processing groups to import the attached files I’ve provide.
NOTE: I typically importing using Tab Separated Values (TSV) as the file type as that as the file type I’ve had the best luck with importing using DIEF. So you can take the Excel files and save them as Test (Tab Separated) to get a TSV file.
After importing both files, you should have the following:
1. Two Product Masters
2. A normal Product
3. A service Item
4. Variants for all your product masters
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