Exporting and importing Vendors from one AX2012 to another

Finance and Operations/AX Developer Forum
1

Hi everyone,

I need your help in determining the best and effective way to export data from one AX 2012 database to another. If anyone has done this and can shed some light, it would be greatly appreciated.

Here’s the background: We have two plain AX 2012 environments both running CU4 and both running on SQL 2008 R2. One of the environments contains data, transactions and a list of vendors. The other environment is a new install of AX and doesn’t have any data or transactions.

We need to export all the vendors from the environment with the transactions and import them to the new clean environment. I’ve heard that IDMF is the tool to use for this task but I also heard that it’s a timely process to set it up and get it running (I may be wrong).

The other method would be to get a list of all tables used/linked by the VendTable and copy the data through a SQL query or an AX job and insert it in the new environment. I’m a little hesitant to take this approach.

Has anyone done this? What tool do you recommend to use?

Thanks for any input!

Bobby Pejman

2

I would recommend you take a SQL backup before transactions and control it this way.

I would then try an import/export group on teh defined tables.

3

Thank you for the suggestion. I was able to get the vendors out of AX using Group Definitions.

Here’s some info that hopefully will save others time:

You may receive some errors while importing data using Group Definitions and you can ignore them for the most part, unfortunately. The best is to resolve them. I believe these errors occur when there’s even the slightest difference between the AX environments. For example, in one installation, I had all languages installed and in another we had only the English language installed and that caused some issues during the import since the table structure changed.

If you have two identical environments (not data-wise) then you should not run into any errors. This process requires you to have two of the same Group Definitions created, one in the source environment and the other in the target environment. When you ask AX to create the table dependencies for a given master table, such as VendTable or CustTable in one environment, the table list may not be the same in another AX environment. Make sure you compare the list of tables in both Group Definitions in both environments so you’re not missing anything.

Hope this helps.

Bobby Pejman