Applying changes and client readiness

In the best practice of development in MS Dynamics AX™ you would normally work on a development environment, test your customizations on a test environment and eventually apply the customization on the production environment.

It is obvious that following the best practice minimizes (I dare say eliminates) the risks involved in making changes to the system. However, two small issues should be kept in mind when you apply the changes to the production environment:

1. The client object cache.
2. The client usage data.

These two issues are related to changes to classes and to changes to the packed objects respectively. To further explain, when you apply changes to forms for example, you can make the client ready to use these changes by simply closing the client and running it again. But when your changes involve:

1. Changes to classes.
2. Changes to the CurrentList local macro (used when packing report or query parameters).

you need to do some extra work to make the client ready (i.e. get the client to “know about” the new changes).

Symptoms of the problems caused by applying such changes are:

1. The system gives results on the client as if nothing have changed (or even sometimes issue an error message which indicates that your code is missing).
2. You get a run-time error in the pack/unpack methods of a report or a class.

To resolve these issues you need to do the following:

1. Clear the client’s object cache: Go to the users application data folder (C:\Users\<User Id>\AppData\Local) on Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008, (C:\Documents and settings\<User Id>\Local Settings\Application Data) on XP. Delete the file ax_{GUID}.auc, where GUID is some system generated alphanumeric Id. Note: If you are using terminal services, this folder will be found on the terminal server.
2. Clear the client’s usage data: On Dynamics AX, go to the user options (Dynamics menu –> Tools –> Options). Find the usage data button, click on it and another form should appear. In the “All usage data” tab, find the object that you changed and delete its corresponding usage data. Or you can simply go to the “General” tab and reset all usage data (which I don’t recommend).

One remark that I have to point out here is that these issues (to the best of my knowledge) should be dealt with one client at a time. I currently don’t know how this solution can be mass-deployed. Luckily I didn’t need to do that for more than a few clients.