Best and fastest way to load Parameters tables, Workers, Assigning employees and all setup data at Go live Date

Finance and Operations/AX General discussions
1

Hi ,

One of my client is having an issue about choosing best way to load Setup tables, Parameter tables, Workers, Employers, Assigning users and etc during go live. We have lot of data for these to be loaded. We are unable to use DIXF for loading Employers, users , assigning workers etc because DIXF doesnt support inheritance tables(Ex: DirParty, DirPerson etc…). The only option we have left is by manually entering, but it might take few days which is not a considerable option for go live. Can some one please suggest what would be the best approaches for loading these above mentioned data. etc.

We are using Dynamics AX 2012 R2.

Thanks in advance.

2

Hello Raj,

you can use excel add in if you are finding problem with DIXF

here is one of the many links which will guid you for excel add ins. hope it will help you

3

Your information about DIXF isn’t correct. For example, the Employee entity is included in AX out of the box. There are also many other entities based on DirPartyTable, such as Customer.

I think you mean that the wizard for custom entities has some limitations, but it doesn’t mean that such entities can’t be created nor that the framework can’t use them.

Some teams prefer preparing the data in a separate database and then copying the whole database as the starting state of the production environment.

4

Thanks Kunal for the reply. I will check the excel add in and will if that is something we can go ahead with.

5

Thanks Martin. Yes while creating entity for Dirparty table has limitations using custom wizard. We cannot copy entire database, because we have already a release for which golive happened last year. So we need to update it. So I am not sure if the database copy would work. Could you please let me know if using DIXF is better option for loading a lot of tables (parameter tables, dirparty related all tables etc). Are there any other approaches you think should be better?

6

You must somewhere have a database where you’re preparing and testing the data, mustn’t you?

Your remark suggests that you also need to export some data from another system, which wasn’t included in your original question. (I wouldn’t even consider updating a database which already contains transactions.)

If it’s the case, I would start with an empty database, use DIXF to export and import the data from your other live system and manually set up things that are specific to the given instance. I would also periodically copy the DB to a test system, where the correctness would be verified. When ready, I would put the DB to the new production system.

7

Hi Martin,

So here are complete details. We are moving from old systems ERP(not ax) to Ax 2012 r2. We have a go live happened one year back. So there is data and transactions available now in Prod. You are saying take a new db and load data using dixf , and do some stuff manually etc. I dont understand one thing, how can we merge data from prod and the new db we created like you said at cutoff date?

8

Just to clarify - you went live 1 year ago on AX and now want to implement the second phase and move more areas from your old ERP system? I am not sure if that is the case from your description - if it is what planning was put in place on the feasibility and approach of moving data into a live system - planning and consideration must have been given to this? What elements are you specifically migrating?

Your first post however would imply you went live on a legacy system and now are looking to move to AX - otherwise why did you not move employees and setup tables a year ago?

9

Hi steve,

You are correct, we are implementing second phase and moving more areas from old ERP. In phase 1 we have loaded users, vendors, items, invoices, bankaccounts, forecast, orders etc. We have a lot of customizations so we are thinking of possible options so that we can load all these stuff on cutoff weekend where we go live. So for this to happen, we need to stop production at cutoff weekend, then get the recent code base and load all these tables and stuff. We are thinking of possible options that will help us in reducing the time taken to load all these things so it will be done on weekend. Manual entry of these employees, assigning employees to users and other groups we have customizations which will store in dirparty inherited tables and others which will take time if done manually. So just checking options to do it the best way .

10

Aha, your original question gave me a completely different impression - I would think you already have things like workers if you’re using the system for a year and the title even say “at Go live Date”. All right, we’re not talking about preparing a system for going live, it’s about importing data to an already life system.
DIXF is still the best tool you have for data imports, and what you’re describing doesn’t sound like large tables, so you should have no problems importing it to production in a two days. Anyway, you can test it many times before to see if performance is all right.