A brief overview about the Services/AIF in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Video presentation also available: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 - Services Demo - Part 1/2 (Concepts overview) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3bHrvWAsG8 Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 - Services Demo - Part 2/2 (Sample application) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP0GnnJ_79s

1. Fabio Filardi
Dynamics AX Technical Architect
fabiofilardi@gmail.com

2. Services
Overview
Lesson 1: Service Groups
Lesson 2: Ports and Adapters
Lesson 3: Infra & Deployment
Lesson 4: Custom Services
Lesson 5: Consuming Web Services
Lesson 6: Transformations
Lesson 7: Office Add-in

3. Overview
 In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, the Application Integration
Framework (AIF) underwent a number of dramatic
changes, starting with its name. The AIF is now known as
Services. In the application you will see it listed as
Services and Application Integration Framework.
 In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, the module offers more
options for WCF service hosts, a reduction in the number
of forms and concepts, an increase in the performance of
service calls and more flexibility in the classes on which
services can be built.

4. Lesson 1: Service Groups
This lesson defines the term Service Group and describes what it contains
What is and advantages
 Service Groups is a new node added to the AOT and they are hosted on
the AOS.
 A single service group consists of a set of services deployed together.
 Besides having services consistently managed and deployed
together, there are other advantages to service groups:
 All the services are contained within the same WSDL;
 You only need to add one service reference in Microsoft Visual Studio
to access all of the objects from the services in the service group;
 You can use the types exposed in the services throughout your .NET
code.

5. Lesson 2: Ports and Adapters
This lesson defines the terms Basic and Enhanced Ports and Adapter types
Introduction
 A port represents a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service
host, and all services that it hosts are WCF endpoints. By default, a port is
hosted on the Application Object Server (AOS) or on Internet Information
Services (IIS) if HTTP is chosen as the adapter.
 In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, the configuration of AIF involved several
concepts including local endpoints, adapters, channels and endpoints. Each
concept had multiple steps and its own form. In Microsoft Dynamics AX
2012, the user interface for the Services module is dramatically restructured
resulting in the introduction of ports and most of the concepts are generated for
you and they are configured in a single form.

6. Lesson 2: Ports and Adapters
This lesson defines the terms Basic and Enhanced Ports and Adapter types
Types
 There are both Inbound and Outbound ports that have similar functionality.
Inbound ports handle incoming requests. Outbound ports handle requests that
are outbound only, such as when the Send electronically is clicked on a form
within the application.
 Inbound ports can be Basic or Enhanced. When a service group is
deployed, basic ports are generated and configured automatically. Enhanced
ports are port you create manually. They give you several options around
hosting, adapter types, document processing, error handling and security.

7. Lesson 2: Ports and Adapters
This lesson defines the terms Basic and Enhanced Ports and Adapter types
Basic Port
 After a service group is deployed, a basic port is generated to represent the
service group. The port will have the same name as the service group it
represents, is deployed as a WCF service hosted on your AOS instances and
you call these services using the NetTcp adapter.

8. Lesson 2: Ports and Adapters
This lesson defines the terms Basic and Enhanced Ports and Adapter types
Enhanced Ports
 Enhanced ports allow many more configuration options than are possible with a
basic port. For example, basic ports are deployed as WCF services only to the
AOS and use the NetTcp adapter. With an enhanced port, you can choose
between an AOS or an IIS host and have several choices for adapter types.
 The options for adapters type are:
File System, HTTP, MSMQ and NetTcp
 Services in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 are hosted on the AOS by default, but
can also be hosted on IIS. To consume services over the Internet, you must
use the HTTP Adapter and host services on IIS. IIS routes all service requests
to the AOS. Regardless of the origin of the service request, Internet or
Intranet, all the service requests are processed on the AOS.

9. Lesson 2: Ports and Adapters
This lesson defines the terms Basic and Enhanced Ports and Adapter types
Enhanced Ports

10. Lesson 3: Infra & Deployment
This lesson describes the changes in infrastructure and deployment
Performance and Scalability Improvements
 The limitations around file sizes (10 MB) no longer exist;
 X++ services classes compile into CIL;
 Intranet deployment does not require IIS, services are hosted on the
AOS by default;
 .NET Business Connector is not used by services hosted on the AOS
and in IIS;
 Session pooling is used to reduce the overhead on operation calls.

11. Lesson 3: Infra & Deployment
This lesson describes the changes in infrastructure and deployment
Services Hosted and Deployed on the AOS
There are a some steps for the service to be exposed on the AOS:
 A new .NET service assembly is built and copied to the Microsoft
Dynamics AX application share.
 If re-deploying, the previous service host on the AOS is stopped and
the old service assembly is unloaded.
 A new service host is created/instantiated on the AOS instance.
 When the AOS starts, the AOS startup code loads the new service
assembly from the application share.
 A new service assembly generated is hosted only in the current
AOS, other AOS instances pick up only at startup time.

12. Lesson 3: Infra & Deployment
This lesson describes the changes in infrastructure and deployment
Services Hosted and Deployed in IIS
Changes in hosting services on IIS for requests originating from the
Internet:
 In MS DAX 2009, IIS hosted services used the .NET Business
Connector (BC) to communicate with the AOS.
 In MS DAX 2012, IIS hosted services use the WCF routing service to
send service requests to the AOS.
 The WCF routing service does use the Business connector proxy
account only to pass the calling user's context to the AOS.
 All service requests, regardless of their origin, are processed on the
AOS.

13. Lesson 4 - Custom Services
This lesson describes changes to create custom document services
Custom Document Services
The steps for creating and updating custom document services are the
same as they were in DAX 2009.
A difference in the process in DAX 2012, is where you implement your
defaulting code.
In all previous versions of DAX, defaulting logic for services was
implemented in AxBC classes like AxSalesTable or AxSalesLine.
The same logic for interactive scenarios was repeated in locations that
could not be used by services like the methods on forms. In Microsoft
Dynamics AX 2012, in order to avoid duplicating logic, defaulting code
can be put on the table in the defaultField() method.

14. Lesson 4 - Custom Services
This lesson describes changes to create custom document services
Custom Document Services
Example of defaultField() usage:

15. Lesson 4 - Custom Services
This lesson describes changes to create custom document services
Custom Document Services
Changes in creating the query used by custom document services:
 It is not necessary to include tables for foreign key references in your
query. The document services framework will provide foreign key
substitution.
 If the tables in your service include dimension key values, it is not
necessary to include the dimension framework tables in your query.

16. Lesson 4 - Custom Services
This lesson describes changes to create custom document services
Custom Services
As in previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics AX, non-document custom
services can be created.
In Dynamics AX 2012, the process for creating a non-document service
class is easier because classes can be decorated as DataContract
classes.
The use of non-document classes is more common in 2012.

17. Lesson 4 - Custom Services
This lesson describes changes to create custom document services
Data and Service Contract Classes
A data contract can be either an X++ or a .NET class that has
getters, setters and the DataContractAttribute attribute. Example:

18. Lesson 4 - Custom Services
This lesson describes changes to create custom document services
Data and Service Contract Classes
After you have created a data contract class, you create the service
contract class. The service contract class is the class that is exposed as
a service. It consumes the data contract class. Example:

19. Lesson 5: Consuming Web Services
This lesson describes the improvements in consuming web services
2012 vs 2009
In DAX 2009, you could consume an external web service from X++ code
by adding a Service reference under the References node of the AOT.
The issue with this functionality was that the service references ran in a
separate application domain compared to the X++ code.
In DAX 2012, this was replaced by a new model for consuming external
Web service, where you can add your Visual Studio projects into AOT.
In Visual Studio, with a reference to the same web service and an
instance of the same proxy class, Intellisense displays many more
properties and methods.

20. Lesson 6: Transformations
This lesson shows the improvements in transformation of incoming data
Improvements
In DAX 2009, you were able to transform incoming data through the use of
pipeline components. The application shipped with two pipeline components:
 Value substitution: allow users to substitute an incoming value with a
destination value.
 XSLT transformation: allowed users to create XSLT transformations that
converted an inbound document format to the required schema of the DAX
document.
In order to implement any other transformations you were required to create a
custom pipeline component class.
We are still able to use value substitution and xslt transformations similar to that
implemented in DAX 2009. In addition, DAX 2012 now allows you to implement
custom transformation assemblies using the .Net and Visual Studio 2010.

21. Lesson 7: Office Add-in
This lesson shows how to use Office with Dynamics AX
Word & Excel
The Office Add-ins for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 enable queries and AIF
Document services to be integrated into Excel or Word.
Only services that have Create or Update methods can be used as data sources
to modify data in excel. In order to use the services, you must first add them to
an AIF Services port and activate the port.
To use a service or query within Microsoft Excel or Word, you must expose
these services and queries as a data source.

22. Services
Have fun. ;)