How to Read email and download attachment from AX (AOS) without Installing Outlook Client and using EWS Exchange Web Services

Design Requirement

To meet one of our solution requirement, we had to built an interface in AX which should be able to read an email with a particular subject line and download the invoice attachment to do further processing and posting of the same.


I searched on the web and most of the existing solutions or blog posts are about AX Sending emails where AX Communicates to Microsoft Exchange Server and is tightly coupled with Outlook client to be installed on AOS or client.

In our server topology, our infrastructure/IT team at the client's place won't allow us to install any office tools on the server, thereby ruling out the option of installing Outlook Client on the server.

Solution

After some research, I found that EWS is the way to go. EWS stands for Exchange Web Services which is an extensible component for clients to connect to your Exchange Server and can read emails from a particular mailbox. Here are the steps:



a. Download EWS SDK by going to this url http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=190F71A4-7B5F-4A4C-99BA-9BD032E16E15&displaylang=en,
Note, we have a separate SDK for EWS 2010. I downloaded the above SDK as our client is still on Exchange Server 2007

b. Install the Exchange Service msi which copies the Exchange Web Service dll to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange folder

c. Retrieve this dll and copy to your assembly on the AOS Server. i.e. you can drag and drop this dll file into C:\Windows\assembly

d. Note that this assembly is a .Net assembly so for me the easiest way was to write a custom wrapper assembly in C# which consumes the Microsoft Exchange Web Service (i.e. the dll in step b)

e. Add this custom dll into your References node in AOT

f. Write a class in AX which invokes your custom assembly


g. In my scenario, all the code had to achieve is given the parameters of email id, subject and UNC path name (Network location), it looks up the Exchange Store, reads the email with that particular subject line and downloads the related invoice attachment and strips it to the folder location on the network



And all this achieved without any mess and just few lines of code. If anybody interested in code, feel free to write to me and I can send you the .cs file



Happy Dax'ing :)