How Alerts in AX work with templates and emails

Alerts in AX can be very useful, and I wanted to touch on how they work, along with some explanations, tips, and tricks.  Much of this post is basic, but there are some caveats explained as well.  I mainly use alerts to notify a user when a field or record is created, modified, deleted, etc.  A user specifically wanted to know whenever a credit limit changed for a customer...so this is the scenario I will be covering.

You first need to make sure you have an alert email template setup.  This can be done from Basic>Setup>Email Templates.  Here you will create your header alert record, and your line records are for different languages should you need them.

After you create the basic one as pictured, you click the "Template" button where you define your template.  I suggest putting in the following HTML code under the HTML tab from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa834376(AX.50).aspx

You then need to configure the alerts parameters at Basic>Setup>Alerts.  You want to choose the "Alerts" email id template you just created.

The "Drill-down target" can be confusing...but here is my interpretation of it.  You basically put something different for each of your AX environments (Dev/Test/Prod).  When you have an alert email sent automatically with hyperlinks, it will be something like Dynamics://DEV... (instead of http://DEV...) that will be clickable, and open an AX client and go directly to the alert or the alert's origin.

When you click the link, it basically tries to go to your default client config, and then it confirms that the "DEV" found in the URL also is found in the alerts setup.  If it is not, it just doesn't open the client.  So if you are getting alerts from Dev/Test/Prod, only the ones that have the correct Dynamics://[this part] will work.  This obviously means you must have a local client installed.

The types of alerts:

• Changed based alerts
• Alerts that occur when something changes, like a customer name, or customer credit limit
• Due date alerts
• Alerts that occur when something is due, typically workflow related

These both have batch jobs, located at Basic>Periodic>Alerts that should be running in order to actually create the alerts that meet the rule criteria.  If you aren't getting the alert bell pictures in the lower corner of your session, then one of these is probably not running correctly.

Now let's setup the alert rule to notify us when the credit limit has changed for a customer.  You can set alerts on anything pretty much you right click on.  Go to your customer details form, then the general tab, then right click on the credit limit field and click "Create alert rule" as pictured:

Now base AX only lets you alert one user.  You can create a user that has a distribution list for an email account, or you can do some simple modifications in X++ to support overwriting the alert email, or alerting multiple emails/users.  For now, you can just click OK here and then close the window behind it.

If we go to a customer and change their credit rating, an alert will be generated (provided the batch is running as stated earlier or it is run manually).

For the email portion, the way alerts are setup is to have traceable emails.  So what it does is dump it into an email sending queue that can be found at Administration>Periodic>E-mail processing>E-mail sending status.

This emailing subsystem is very handy, and open for many useful modifications if you're feeling creative.  Emails in this queue are picked up for delivery by the e-mail processing batch, which is located at Administration>Periodic>E-mail processing>Batch.  This must be running for the emails to go out.

You can view sent emails with the body of the message, and also resend them should you choose to do so.

There is also a retry schedule that is located in the same place where you can set your retry intervals for failed email attempts.

The framework is here behind the scenes to open it up for some very useful modifications.  For example, if you periodically email customers a survey, and you want to send them reminders to fill it out, or you are waiting for any other sort of user input and you want to send emails until they perform their action.

This just briefly outlines and touches on alerts and emails.  If you have any questions, feel free to comment.  I will be elaborating on email templates later on.