Microsoft Dynamics AX exposes data for exchange with external systems through business logic exposed as services.
The data and business logic together is called a document.
The document service classes are part of the XML Document Framework.
This framework consists of the classes that implement the business logic for individual documents in Microsoft Dynamics AX. You can also use this framework to create your own custom documents that can be sent using AIF.
As a group, these classes encapsulate the business logic for individual documents.
The XML Document Framework contains these types of classes:
A document service class is the top-level class that provides an external interface that represents the business logic. Document service classes include the service classes and their related data contract classes.
Document Service Classes
The service class is the top-level class that is exposed as a service through the Application Object Tree (AOT). You can view service classes in the Classes node in the AOT. The service classes are exposed as services, which you can view in Services node in the AOT. Each service class is derived from the AifDocumentService class. The service methods delegate their operations to the AifDocumentService class. For example, the SalesSalesOrderService.read method calls the AifDocumentService.readList method as shown in the following code.
public SalesSalesOrder read(AifEntityKeyList _entityKeyList)
{
SalesSalesOrder salesSalesOrder = new SalesSalesOrder();
this.readList(_entityKeyList, salesSalesOrder);
return salesSalesOrder;
}
The service class implements the methods that are needed to perform operations on the data. These methods are exposed as service operations by the service.
Data Object Classes
Data objects provide a data contract for the XML data that is exchanged through AIF. The data object classes reflect the data hierarchy of the query that is the basis of an AIF document. These classes are used only to work with data; they contain no business logic. The data object classes are found in the Classes node in the AOT.
The following table shows how the relationship between the data sources, XML elements, and data object classes is modeled in for a subset of the data sources included in the Customer service.
Document Data Object Class
The document data object class is the top-level data object and represents the whole XML document. The following list contains features of the document data object classes:
Implement the AifDocument class.
Encapsulate data being exchanged with AIF.
Passed as parameters to the update and create methods.
Used as the return value of the service class find and read methods.
For example, CustCustomer is the document data object and depends on the CustCustomer_CustTable data object. The CustCustomer_CustTable data object in turn depends on the CustCustomer_DirParty data object.
Although the document data object class implements the AifDocument class, it is still considered a data object. This is because the AifDocument class implements the AfStronglyTypedDataContainer class, just as the data object classes do.
Data Object Classes
The data object classes provide an object model for the service data. Data object classes implement the AifStronglyTypedDataContainer class which in turn implements the AifXmlSerializable interface.
There is a data object class for each data source in the query. For example, the customer data objects are the CustCustomer_CustTable class and the CustCustomer_DirParty class. The CustCustomer_CustTable class depends on the CustCustomer_DirParty class which models the relationship of this data in the database.
AIF Class Naming Conventions
Document name
|
Name of the document
|
User-defined name describing the document
|
SalesOrder
|
Service class
|
Name of the AIF service class
|
<Prefix> + <Document Name> + "Service"
|
SalesSalesOrderService
|
Document class
|
Name of the X++ class for the root data object
|
<Prefix> + <Document Name>
|
SalesSalesOrder
|
Data objects
|
Name of the X++ class for the child data objects of the document class
|
<Root data object name> + "_" + <Query data source Name>
|
SalesSalesOrder_SalesTable, SalesSalesOrder_DocuRefHeader, SalesSalesOrder_DocuRefLine, SalesSalesOrder_InventDim, SalesSalesOrder_MarkupTransHeader, SalesSalesOrder_MarkupTransLine, SalesSalesOrder_SalesLine
|
AOT service node
|
Name of the AOT node for the service
|
<Prefix> + <Document Name> + "Service"
|
SalesSalesOrderService
|
Service external name
|
Name of the service published to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
|
<Document Name> + "Service"
|
SalesOrderService
|
Table class names
|
Name of the Ax <Table> classes
|
"Ax" + query data source table name
|
AxSalesTable, AxInventDim, AxDocuRef, AxMarkupTrans, AxSalesLine
|
Query
|
Name of the query
|
"Axd" + user-defined document name
|
AxdSalesOrder
|
Document class name
|
Name of the Axd <Document> class
|
Same name as the query
|
AxdSalesOrder
|
The source of data for each document is a query (the Axd document query). The query controls the content and structure of the data in the document.
Document services are XML documents that initiate transfer of data into or out of Dynamics AX. Any entity in AX can be represented as Documents, such as Customers or Sales Orders.
Document services are used when we have to execute complex CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on an entity.
