SQL Server CTEs and Recursive Parent Grouping in Advanced Mode Group Properties in SSRS

Hello!

Few weeks ago, I was developing an interesting report in SSRS which pulls out data from AX - Projects module.

It was interesting for 2 reasons:

1. I learned to use more effectively SQL Server CTE's (Common table expressions) while developing this report.

From a layman's perspective, CTEs were introduced since SQL Server 2005 and it’s more useful to do a recursive search (display hierarchical data e.g. employee-manager, BOM etc). In my scenario, I had to do a recursive search for Project-Parent Id in my Stored proc)

Below sharing some links, which will explain further more in detail about CTE's and how to implement them.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186243(v=sql.105).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc794278.aspx

2.  The second concept was about recursive parent Grouping (in SSRS)

In SSRS, we can group the child field based on the recursive parent key (There’s an option in the Edit Group > Advanced Section to key in the Recursive parent field) – explained here in this blog - http://sql-bi-dev.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/recursive-hierarchy-group-in-ssrs-2008.html

Quick Tip - Saving Macro enabled worksheet (Excel 2010)

Have been playing around with VBA coding these days (with Excel 2010) as we are building a Budget Template to capture Budgets for various projects and then consolidate it into one excel workbook so that it can be imported into AX.

VB and VBA has been one of my favorite languages since I started programming back in 2000. I still love to work in VB editor if i get a chance and one of my first project was building a Review Toolbar using VBA (Word Macros), Very interesting then :)

Now after 10 years, there has been quite some changes with the way macros are handled especially with Excel based macros. In Excel 2010, if you want to save a sheet/workbook then while saving you have to use the "Excel Macro Enabled Worksheet" rather than the default Excel option.

Below Link helped me To save macros http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/saving-and-using-an-excel-2010-macroenabled-workbo.html

Review - Dynamics AX 2012 Development Cookbook

I didn't get much of  a chance to do a deep dive into Dynamics AX 2012 Development Cookbook http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-dynamics-ax-2012-development-cookbook/book

In my opinion the book comes handy for a developer to directly jump to the topic which they are interested in rather than scanning chapter by chapter.

However I think some more areas the book could have covered is:

a. Enterprise Portal
b. AX Administration (Models administration etc)
c. Security
d. Reporting and Analytics

Maybe I'm asking bit more from a development cookbook, Just my 2 cents - with AX 2012, there's a lot of integration happening with other Microsoft technology stack like VS.Net, SQL, SSRS, SSAS, etc so maybe the future versions of the book should cover more on these areas as well.

However, I would recommend this book for a developer as it's quite useful when it comes to day-to-day development tasks. Again Good work by the author and keep it up!

Troubleshooting AX AOS Peformance on VM

Hello!
Thought to share one odd issue regarding AX performance

Issue:

We have one of our DEV AOS's running on a separate VM and suddenly we were experiencing performance degradation

Solution:

Upon troubleshooting with help of our networking guys, we figured out that the culprit was cqmgserv.exe.
We no longer needed this HP Monitoring service so disabled it and that solved the issue.

CU3 Update for Dynamics AX 2012 Released

Microsoft has released Cumulative Update 3 (CU3) for Dynamics AX 2012 which contains hotfixes that were fixed since the release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. This article contains information about how to obtain the cumulative update and about the issues that are fixed by the cumulative update.


Note The build number of this cumulative update package is 6.0.1108.670.

Read more about the update by going through the below link (You might need to Sign in with your Live Id for Partnersource/CustomerSource)
https://mbs2.microsoft.com/Knowledgebase/KBDisplay.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2709934