Florian's weblog

Memory leaks and profiling with .Net

2009-11-04T21:48:00Z

I wrote some moths ago an article about the GC and highlighted some particularities (unsafe and unmanaged code, disposing and finalizing, etc).

When you are developing with .Net you will be sometimes faced to memory or resource leaks. Especially if you are using the BC.Net, since the BC.Net is using unsafe and unmanaged code. But even with X++ you will be more and more faced to such problems. So it is very useful to know as much as possible about causes, identification and resolving.

Fabrice Marguerie (co-author of LINQ in Action) wrote a great article on MSDN (his blog entry for the trackback) about this subject. Enjoy this article!

IDynamicsAXExpressionBuilder returned error code 0x80131509 - reloaded

2009-08-20T12:21:12Z

As I already wrote it in the update of that blog entry in my first posing about this issue:

The origin of this issue can be found in the method 'buildEnumerationXml' of the class 'SysExpression':

Currently, a loop iterates until the last element:
for (i = sysDictEnum.firstValue(); i <= sysDictEnum.lastValue(); i = sysDictEnum.nextValue(i)) 
I you replace this (sysDictEnum.lastValue(); ) by the number of elements (sysDictEnum.values();) the issue is solved.

[UPDATE 03/09/2009]

The hotfix for this bug has been published: KB974925 (Build: 5.0.1500.1255).

Importing Leads and Contacts

2009-08-19T01:11:00Z

You can find a very good description on our team blog (EMEA Dynamics AX Support) how to import leads and contact Xml files with Dynamics Ax 2009 here. The problem you will be faced by using this is, that you can’t import data with non Ascii characters, which might cause some difficulties. The reason for that is the way how the Xml files is proceeded during the transformation process.

Ax creates first a copy of the Xml file and the Xslt File in the temp directory of the AOS which is by default:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics AX\50\Application\appl\DynamicsAx1\tmp\

Unfortunately this is done by reading out the Xml file into a container and then creating a new Xml file by using the method:

SysImportUtil/createFileFromContainer

Unfortunately because it is using the AsciiIo to create the file. Since this class is intended to encode the content of the container into Ascii, it is incompatible with Xml files. The sample files are using Xml files encoded in Utf-8 which is some kind of an extension to Ascii and this is the reason why you can’t use this import for non Ascii characters:

[..] AsciiIO supports only ANSI code page (ACP) characters.

But you can fix this by replacing the AsciiIo by the TextIo class. Msdn describes it as follow:

TextIO replaces AsciiIO to provide support for non-ANSI code page file I/O. The TextIO constructor has an additional optional parameter to set the code page of the file.

This is exactly what we need. The most common codepages are:

0 - CP_ACP; the ANSI code page
437 - OEM code page 437
850 - Code page 850
1200 - UTF-16LE (default value)
1201 - UTF-16BE
65001 - UTF-8
54936: GB-18030

So, if you want to use the Xml-files from the example without any modification you need to change the codepage to 65001, but it is easier to change the Xml-file to Utf-16. This can be done easily by using Visual Studio:

Just open the Xml-file, change the Utf-8 to Utf-16 and safe the changes. Why not using the notepad ?

Visual Studio reads out the Xml encoding information:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

and adds the required file signature to that file (called BOM). These information can be consulted with the Visual Studio binary editor (File/Open/File/<select Xml-file>/Open as/binary editor): “EF BB BF” for Utf-8 and “FF FE” for Utf-16.

So in order to import data with non-Ascii data, you have to:

replace the AsciiIo class by TextIo
import Utf-16 encoded Xml data.

Template Wizard does create SheetNames with more than 30 characters

2009-08-18T22:14:53Z

The Template Wizard (Administration/Periodic/Data export/import/Excel spreadsheets/Template Wizard) creates unfortunately SheetNames that might exceed 30 characters, which is not allowed by Excel and results in annoying message boxes that are requesting a new SheetName with less than 31 characters.

The following code change in the method SysDataExcelDef/buildTmpExcelWorksheet will resolve this problem:

   1:          //modifications done for working with long tablenames

   2:          //    str tempSheetName;

   3:          //    str suffixName;

   4:          //    int suffixlength;

   5:          //original code:

   6:          //tmpExcelWorksheet.SheetName = tmpExcelWorksheet.TableName + '_' + int2str(sysExpImpTable.OccurrenceId) + '-1';

7:

   8:          tempSheetName = tmpExcelWorksheet.TableName + '_' + int2str(sysExpImpTable.OccurrenceId) + '-1';

9:

  10:          if (strlen(tempSheetName) > 30)

  11:          {

  12:              tempSheetName = tmpExcelWorksheet.TableName;

  13:              suffixName =  '_' + int2str(sysExpImpTable.OccurrenceId) + '-1'; //as this is done in the original code

  14:              suffixLength = strlen(suffixName);

  15:              tempSheetName = substr(tempSheetName, 0, 30 - suffixLength);

  16:              //assigning the new name

  17:              tmpExcelWorksheet.SheetName = tempSheetName + suffixName;

  18:          }

  19:          else

  20:          {

  21:              tmpExcelWorksheet.SheetName = tempSheetName;

  22:          }

Large Xml-documents with an AIF-WebService.

2009-08-11T12:48:00Z

If you are faced to 'large' Xml-documents with AIF-WebServices, you might be faced to difficulties for Inbound and OutBound services. The following two points should be applied for the client app.config, if the client uses the WCF for communicating with the AIF-WebService (Inbound-Services - you are sending large Xml-Documents to the AIF-WebService), and on the server web.config (Outbound-Services - you are receiving large Xml-documents from the WebService) 1) Changing the web.config by adding the...(read more)

‘0’-values don’t appear in Xml files generated by the AIF

2009-08-11T11:57:21Z

Numeric values that are 0 (not null) are not serialized and don't appear in the Xml file. The reason for this is, that the numeric types in Dynamics Ax are not nullable (must have a value) and do interpret the value 0 as a "null value" (0 as a ‘ magic number ’) during the serialization. The only possibility is to declare these columns as mandatory, so that they are serialized even with 0 as value. Another way is to inform the consumer application (which might be BizTalk) that non mentioned...(read more)

AIF-service call with COM and .Net Business Connector

2009-08-11T11:48:46Z

When executing an AIF-service with the COM and .Net Business Connector the client will not be notified about exceptions during the execution. The reason for this is, that AIF-services are always executed within a transaction ( ttslevel = 1) even when no ttsBegin has been executed. And as described on the X++ blog , exceptions are not caught within the transaction (sample is taken from the X++ blog): 1: try 2: { 3: MyTableType t; 4: ttsBegin; // Start a transaction 5: try 6: { 7: throw error(“Something...(read more)

Request for the permission of type 'SecurityPermission' failed

2009-08-10T20:49:00Z

When you get the following exception while executing a report on the SSRS or within Ax: System.Security.SecurityException was unhandled Message=" Request for the permission of type 'System.Security.Permissions.SecurityPermission, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.” this is probably because the permission set in the config file of the SSRS - which you can normally find here (SQL 2005): C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportServer...(read more)

base64Encode() of the kernel class ‘Image’ does return an empty string

2009-08-10T18:32:24Z

A partner asked me why the base64Encode method of the Image class does always return an empty string. In the following example: 1: Image image; 2: str sBase64Encode; 3: ; 4: image = new Image(); 5: image.loadImage(@ 'C:\sample.bmp' ); 6: 7: sBase64Encode = image.base64Encode(); 8: info(sBase64Encode); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin:...(read more)

Gender information in Employees-form and the Global Address Book (GAB)

2009-08-10T12:47:00Z

You can open the information about employees with the Global Address Book (Basic/Global Address Book) and with the Employees form (Basic/Employees). Normally it is no problem to modify data in both forms, but unfortunately this is not true for the ‘gender’ property . This information is stored in the DirPersonPartyDetail ( Gender ) and EmplTable (EmplGender) table. The particularity here is, that the EmplGender property is of type ‘ EmplGender ’ which has two states (0:Male;1:Female) and the enum...(read more)

IDynamicsAXExpressionBuilder returned error code 0x80131509

2009-05-05T18:05:00Z

In forms that are using the ActiveX-control ExpressionBuilder (like TrvPolicyForm) you might be faced to the following error message: Method 'initialize' in COM object of class 'IDynamicsAXExpressionBuilder' returned error code 0x80131509 (<unknown>) which means: End enum not found. This is caused by an enumerator that is used by the ActiveX-control . The method "initialize" of that ActiveX-control requires in its first parameter the expression in a Xml-document. That Xml-document contains...(read more)

Webcast: .Net for X++ programmers

2009-03-19T20:32:00Z

I will do a short Webcast about .Net basics for X++ developers which is based on the articles I posted here recently. During 1 hour I’ll talk about the basics of .Net and how to do’s. If you are a X++ programmer and you are new to .Net, this Webcast might interest you. The Webcast take place on Tuesday April 2nd 2009 at 16:00 GMT+1. Update: I'll publish the registration link as soon as it will be available. This should be done in the next few days. Update: Here are the missing information: Course...(read more)

Some links to IIS 7 information

2009-03-03T13:28:00Z

IIS 7 changed fundamentally since IIS 6. Here are some links that might help you when you feel lost with all these changes ;-) IIS 7 Links: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732976.aspx ( IIS 7.0: Operations Gui de) http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference ( IIS 7.0 Configuration Reference ) http://www.iis.net/getstarted IIS 7 breaking changes: http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/12/08/IIS-7.0-Breaking-Changes-ASP.NET-2.0-applications-Integrated-mode.aspx IIS 7 configuration: http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/07/21/Anatomy-of-an-IIS7-configuration-path.aspx...(read more)

Deploying service references with Dynamics Ax 2009

2009-02-09T16:46:12Z

Service references are are great feature in Dynamics Ax 2009 and using WCF with Ax is now really easy. But unfortunately it is not easy to deploy this service reference. If you now need to deploy a service reference from the development environment to the evaluation environment, or from the evaluation to the production environment, there is no functionality that will automate this. In order to keep all your modification, I would suggest the following procedure: Make a backup of the app.config of...(read more)

RPC error 1702 when calling a WinAPI method from a batch job

2009-01-29T16:55:00Z

You probably already noticed that error messages are sometimes not really helpful when you are trying to understand a problem. The following code creates such misleading error message: 1: public void run() 2: { 3: ; 4: if (WinApi::folderExists( @"c:\temp\")) 5: info("Folder exists "); 6: else 7: info("Folder does not exists"); 8: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/...(read more)