AX2009 Q&A

Q:The customer is using AX2009 SP1 RU6, Sharepoint 2010, SSRS 2008, Windows Server R2 2008.     They are seeing web user sessions days after the user has logged off.      Connection timeout settings in IIS are set to 2 minutes and idle timeout on the application pool is set to 1 minute and users have properly logged off.      These appear to me to be Reporting and Analysis services content from the Role Center pages.    Customer is concerned this will with licensing issues and feels that if they are not active they should not appear.    Can I get some help with this?

A:This may depend on if there has been any customizations to use session state or not on EP or your custom web site.

We have seen where we need to edit the web.config for the sessionState, but this may also depend on your version of IIS.

I assume you are running IIS 7.5, but in the EP web.config file under the system.web heading you can try adding:

<sessionState mode=”InProc” timeout=”20″ /> this will timeout is 20 minutes or however often you want this set in minutes.

There may be a few other settings on IIS that may be affecting this so you may want to work with the IIS team as well to understand how they interact.

If the connections are coming from SSRS and SSAS then those connections may also be controlled by the configuration files from those applications.

Q:Has anyone encountered this warning in the event log? The system is in Dynamics AX 4.0 SP1

Event ID 110 Type: Warning

Object Server 01: Trying to deref an invalid pointerMap reference.

A:This error is usually seen on AOS shutdown or related to an AOS crash. I usually encounter the problem under a few different situations. 1. In a development environment where things are changing very fequently and some the dev changes require an AOS cache flush or an AOS restart. 2. In an environment where there are a number of integrations or connections using a customized .NET BC. In those situations, when the AOS is restarted, there can be integrations still running that don’t detect that the AOS has been restarted and destroy and re-connect to the AOS again. .NET BC such as for EP has been written to check for this and restart as needed, but most custom integrations are not. In those situation you need to remember to restart all integrations calling the .NET BC, or BC com when the AOS is restarted. 3. When customer or partners are deploying new code in the middle of the day with end users still in the system and without a scheduled downtime and AOS restart.

Q:I was wondering if Workflow notification can also be synchronized with Outlook like tasks or appointments. I quickly ran some test but it looks like workflow notifications can’t become tasks or any type of activities in AX.

A:I’m afraid there’s no way in standard AX to synchronize workflow notifications in this way. Users can however view a worklist on Enterprise Portal containing all of their workflow notifications.

Q:What is the purpose of bottleneck resources in work center for production scheduling?

A:You can define a work center as a bottleneck resource. You can then define settings in Master Planning to use finite capacity for those work centers marked as bottleneck resources.

Q:Can anyone let me know how to define the fields ordering generated in XML file in DAX 2009? Standard AX defined the default XML template but we need to change it base on our own user define template.

A:It sounds like you are using AIF to generate XML documents.  Based on this assumption, the AIF classes build the XML alphabetically for the most part.  All fields are alphabetical, followed by an alphabetical list of entities.  Each entity will then have its own set of alphabetically ordered fields as well.  This cannot easily be changed without modifying some of the base AIF classes which I would NOT recommend doing.

Rather you need to look at using some process to transform the AX generated XML into the desired format.  If you are familiar with creating XML transforms (XSLT files), you could use the transform pipeline component to have AX do the transformation while the document is processed.  The AIFXmlTransform pipeline component is available out of the box and can be used with XSLT documents to transform incoming/outgoing XML files.  For more on using this component review the following site:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa496464.aspx

Outside of this you would need to look at using other products outside of AX capable of transforming the standard response into the format you desire.

Q:Client has a DEV and PROD AX 2009 environment. They have configured things for workflow in DEV. They are not live yet. When they want to go live and restore the AX databse over to the prod environment will workflow configuration move accordingly? If not how is that stored and is there a way to move the setup from one environment to another.

A:What I would be concerned after restoring the Dev environment over the top of your production environment that you workflow URL is pointed to the correct machine, etc… so that’s one thing to keep in mind.

As for the workflow configurations, that information is held in the Tables so yes it should move over accordingly.  There is also an export and import feature for configurations which should meet your requirement.  If you go to any configuration version and highlight it, you should be able to export an .awc file that can be imported into another environment.

Q:We are having an issue where even after users have properly logged off, their web user sessions are still displaying on the online users form quite a few days later. The web users are from the Role Centres.

Does anybody have any idea how this could be caused? I have already asked the client to check if the users sessions were terminated, but they all ended their sessions correctly.

A:I understand that you’re seeing web user sessions remaining in the Online Users form for days after the user has logged off. These web user sessions are related to the use of role centers, which typically creates two web user sessions (for EP as Role Centers are effectively EP pages displayed in the client and for SSRS reports that are contained within the role center pages).

I’ve been investigating whether this is something we’ve seen before but as far as I can tell it’s not a known issue. I just tested this in the AX2009 SP1 Refresh 2 VPC and in my tests I saw the web user sessions were logged out approx. 20 mins after the user closed the client.

Typically, a web user session will remain logged in for 20 mins after a user logs out, after which time the session reaches the timeout of the web service. However the same session can be reused within that time if the user logged back into AX. It could be that your IIS settings for the EP site are causing this behaviour. There is a connection timeout property in IIS and also an idle timeout property in the Advanced Settings of the Application Pool which by default is set to 20 mins.

We would like to run multiple Enterprise portals and reporting extensions on the same machine, for example both productive and testsystems. According to what I’ve seen it is possible to have two or more instances of the enterprise portal by editing the web.config file but can they both run simultaneously?

The reporting extensions are also using the business connector so I guess it depends on wheter the business connector can have more than one instance running at a time? I thought maybe first the reports in the report manager were using the AX datasource file in the folder so you could set up different folders for test & productive systems and the reports would use this datasource file to connect to the correct system but it looks like that was just a dream 🙂

I guess this is possible if both systems do not need to be run simultaneously, by changing the current configuration for the business connector.

Q:I would like to ask general information regarding Database Replication / Disaster Recovery. What are usual/recommended practices accross implementations for these. i,e, database backup (full? / differential?), transaction log backups?

A:My proposal for you is:

– full database backup for every working day

– transaction log backup executed every hour and store to the next full backup

If you have very large database you could execute full database backup every week and differential backup every day.

Q:I want to run an insert_statement instead of a while-loop. But since you can’t add logic while it is running the inserts, how would I add either a progressbar or some GUI stating the client is working? Currently the client freeze when the insert is running.

A: There really isn’t any good way for you to indicate any progress during recordset operations.  You could put a progress bar up, the same as with any other process, but the problem is that when you perform an insert_recordset it is one bulk operation and you wont’ be able to update the progress bar until after the operation completes.  Essentially users would see 0% progress and then very quickly at the end of the operation they would see 100% complete.