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Monday, November 7, 2011

Changing dimensions on an item the easy way using xRecord.merge?

Many of us have hit the same issue at some point, where a dimension needs to be changed on an item, and going about doing it can be a very big hassle.

This post is purely experimental, and I am currently assessing the feasibility of it, so please be very critical of it.  I'm looking for feedback on issues I've not yet thought of.

A project I'm working on is changing/removing the serialization dimension on many different items. The customer has gone from AX 3.0 to 4.0 to 2009, so there is a good share of old/bad data, old open transactions, etc.

Our goal is to turn on "blank issue allowed" and "blank receipt allowed" to make transfers/movements easier.

There are two basic ways that I can think of to change the dimensions on the items, and these are very brief steps that would actually require more thought/elaboration in a real scenario:

  • Scrap out all inventory, close all open transactions, then change the dimension
    • Difficulty: High
  • Create a new item with desired dimension, transfer old item to new item, then rename primary key to get the ItemId back to old value
    • Difficulty: Low, but you lose item history, so this often won't work.

I tried to get creative and think out of the box on this one a bit because the amount of work required to close all open transactions is huge, plus could mean several days, maybe even weeks of downtime because of the amount of transactions constantly going on.  This customer can not be shut down for more than a few days too.

My idea is to create a new item with the desired dimension, then use the Kernel xRecord.Merge functionality to merge the item with the old dimension into the newly configured item, then use the primary key functionality to rename the put the ItemId back.  I just tried this yesterday, so I've barely looked at system functionality beyond some simple tests.  The transactions came over, the BOMs came, etc...so it has some promise.

Some initial thoughts where this might have some holes...since we are moving the old item into the new item, the new item will have a new recId.  So if there are any tag tables that reference by RecId, this would clearly cause an issue.  I believe if the correct relation is setup though, that it might propagate correctly.  Tables like the Address or DocuRef (document handling) however that use commons and reference by Table and RecId might have some issues.  I have yet to test this.

There are some other minor steps that will need to be done in this code, such as confirming that those tables I delete have the previous values passed over...things such as item price.  If you have other custom code, you may need to add/remove some of the tables I deleted.  The discovery process on this was pretty simple, I ran it, then the validate would fail and I'd delete records out of the table, and rerun until it worked.

The "Master" item here is the new item with the new dimension.  The "child" item is the original item with the dimension we want to change.

Anyway, here is the proof of concept code you've been waiting for.  Please comment with thoughts/concerns/experience:




static void ItemMerge(Args _args)
{
    ItemId      iMaster = '26101A'; // New item with newly configured dimension
    ItemId      iChild  = '26101';  // Original item with old dimension

    InventTable master;
    InventTable child;
    CUSInventTable          t1;
    InventTableModule       t2;
    InventItemLocation      t3;
    InventItemPurchSetup    t4;
    InventItemSalesSetup    t5;
    ConfigTable             t6;
    ;


    ttsbegin;
    delete_from t1
        where t1.ItemId == iMaster;

    delete_from t2
        where t2.ItemId == iMaster;

    delete_from t3
        where t3.ItemId == iMaster;

    delete_from t4
        where t4.ItemId == iMaster;

    delete_from t5
        where t5.ItemId == iMaster;

    delete_from t6
        where t6.ItemId == iMaster;

    child = InventTable::find(iChild, true);
    master = InventTable::find(iMaster, true);

    child.merge(master);
    master.doUpdate();
    child.doDelete();
    ttscommit;

    info("Done");
}

1 comment:

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