SharePoint – General

• Tom Van Gaever – Blog: another Belgian SharePoint blog. 

SharePoint - Design and Customization

• Color Coding – Formula Generator: Formula Generator to build calculated colored columns on a SharePoint list.

Dynamics AX

• Supply Chain Management in Dynamics AX: This blog is about the supply chain management area in Microsoft Dynamics AX. It will primarily focus on the product functionality shipped in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. The target audiences are partners and customers, who want to extend their knowledge within this product area.
• Dilip’s blog on Dynamics AX: Dynamics AX and related MS technologies blog.
• Dianne Siebold’s WebLog: News and ramblings on the Dynamics AX SDK documentation.
• FourOne Developer – How to read the Data Dictionary in Axapta
• Lean Manufacturing for Microsoft Dynamics AX: Lean Manufacturing for Microsoft Dynamics AX will help mid-sized organizations to implement and utilize lean tools such as Kanban, lean order schedules, Heijunka board scheduling and much more.  This will enable them to embark on the “Lean journey” - helping streamline and optimize their manufacturing processes, and to take their business to new levels of profitability and growth.
• Changing AOT properties from code

Freeware

• Xobni – Outlook Plugin to Search People, Email, and Attachments Instantly

Solution: re-use the Company logo code

Such functionality exists in standard Dynamics AX to store a Company logo for each Company Account (Basic>Setup>Company information>Company logo button). The great news is the code can be easily reused on whatever other form, since the table CompanyImage for storage of the images is generic as it contains the TableId and RecId of the record to which you link the image.

In the next example I’ll attach a logo to my CustTable records: so for each customer I would like to store a logo.

1. Open the Application Object Tree (AOT) and browse to Menu Items>Display>CompanyImage.
2. Open another AOT window and browse to your Customers form (Forms>CustTable).
3. Open the Design>Design>ButtonGroup node of the CustTable form.
4. Drag the CompanyImage menu item in the ButtonGroup.
5. Right-click the just added MenuItemButton and choose Properties. Add Customer Logo as Text property.
6. Save your changes.

When you open the Customers form now, a new button will be available Customer Logo. Click on it and you’ll be able to attach an image file to the active customer record. No further coding needed for storing, changing, viewing the image!

Your records will be saved in the CompanyImage table with as RefTableId the TableId (77) of the CustTable and the RefRecId of the Customer record selected upon attaching the image file.

To use these images in f.e. a report, add a Bitmap control to the report Design.

Add a display method for this added Bitmap control which looks for example as underneath (I work further on the example where I added images to my CustTable records). In my example I suppose there is a datasource for CustInvoiceJour.

display Bitmap  showCustomerLogo()

{

    CustTable       custTable = CustTable::find(
                            custInvoiceJour.InvoiceAccount);

    ;
  
    return CompanyImage::find(custTable.dataAreaId, 
                  custTable.TableId, custTable.RecId).Image;

}

Solution: add some form methods

To fix this, you should add some methods to your form.

str fileNameLookupFilename()

{

    return '';

}

str fileNameLookupTitle()

{

    return "@SYS53008";

}

str fileNameLookupInitialPath()

{

    return '';

}
container fileNameLookupFilter()

{

    return ['All files','*.*'];

}

An example can be found on form CompanyImage.

You could replace the fileNameLookupFilter to show only files of a certain type, for example only *.txt files. An example could be in this case:

container fileNameLookupFilter() 

{ 

    return ['All *.txt files','*.txt']; 

}

Preparation

Suppose you have created a Subsite for all your projects (called Projects) under the top level Web Site. For each project, you’ve created a specific Subsite under the Projects Subsite.

What we’ll need first, is that we can link this Subsite to a Dynamics AX ProjId. To achieve this, set the URL name of eacht Project Subsite to <ProjId>_<dataAreaId>. So the url should look like http://<webapplication>/projects/<ProjId>_<dataAreaId>.

Adapt the Field Rendering Control

In the Field Rendering Control DAXProjActivityTxtFieldControl.cs we’ve created a method PopulateDAXProjActivityTxts. In this method, we used two arguments, being the ProjId and the dataAreaId, which we gave a hardcoded value. We are going to make this values depending on our url.

1. First of all we need to add an additional using statement to be able to use the SPWeb Class.:
   

   using Microsoft.SharePoint;

   
   



2. In the method PopulateDAXProjActivityTxts, look for the lines where we set a value for the arguments passed to our SQL query (args[0] = …). Replace those lines with the following code:
   
   
   
   
   

   //return the Web site of the current request
   SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;
   // url of the Web site
   string path = web.Url;
   Uri uri = new Uri(path);
   // get part of url where ProjId and dataAreaId are stored
   string proj = uri.Segments.GetValue(2).ToString();
   char[] splitter = { '_' };
   string[] splittedproj = proj.Split(splitter);
   // ProjId
   args[0] = splittedproj[0];
   // dataAreaId
   args[1] = splittedproj[1];

   
   



3. Build your Visual Studio project: the post-build events added previously will install everything needed to your SharePoint environment.

Result

When you create or edit an item in the list, your drop down column will be loaded with values from your Microsoft Dynamics AX source: but now those values will be variable: they’ll depend upon the part of your url where you created the link with your ProjId and dataAreaId.