AX 2009 Integration with third party tool

Hi,

We have AX 2009 SP1. We recently bought a third party pay roll from Menaitech. We need a minimal integration with AX 2009 and the above payroll (One way integration only)

On every month end from the payroll program they will move the summary to a temporary table or let us say Interim table. The structure of the data will suit the format of LedgerJournalTrans table. The above task will be done by the 3rd party company. After this I have to do the AX part.

My points:

(a) I assume that we have to run a job which will look into the interim table and fetch the records from the interim table and populate the LedgerJournalTrans table and also create one record in LedgerJournalTable.

(b) My assumption is that the Interim table will be created via AOT. Is this a nice idea?

Please advise me on the above points.

regards

Thomas

I personally don’t like the idea of writing directly to AX DB, even if the tables are not used for anything else. Nevertheless I’ve already seen many solutions doing that.

The advantage is that you can very easily read the data through normal table buffers. The disadvantage is that you have to allow the external system to access AX DB, deal with DataAreaId and RecId values and so on.

Alternative solutions (AIF, interim database etc.) provides looser coupling and potentially additional features (especially AIF), but they may also require more development work. Nevertheless, ledger journal are supported by AIF out of the box - you should consider using that.

Hi,

Thanks for the valuable feedback. I am new to AX development. I have basic idea of AIF. I need your advise to get started with setting up AIF to use it with Leger journal trans. Please tell me where do i get started with?

regards

Thomas

I’m not sure what you expect… You should start with the analysis which type of communication (web service, file system adapter etc.) suits you, if any, and configure AIF appropriately. Then generate a web service client, export data from the external system to XML according the given schema or do anything else needed for the selected transport adapter.

Also look at Ledger General Journal Document documentation.

Yes, AIF is standard option however, You can also use business connector if the volume of data is less and you need to fetch the data only @month end.

Please refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/bb496526(v=ax.50).aspx for more details.

Hope this will also helps.