1. MVC in AX2012 Rama Sridhar Ramasridhar_rr@hotmail.com

2. Agenda
What is MVC?
Overview on BOF
BOF in Services
BOF in Reports
Q&A

3. What is MVC?
Is MVC an architecture or design pattern?

4. Pros and cons of MVC Pros: Loosely coupled
Clear separation of UI, Data and Business logic
Test Driven
Code Reuse
Hide Data Access
Adaptable to change
cons:
Duplicated code between common views
Not a true n-tier architecture (triangulation)
Not a true publisher – subscriber model

5. Business Operation Framework
The Business Operation Framework service is one of the system services exposed by Microsoft Dynamics AX and that adheres to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) protocols and standards. Following are the features of BOF:
Allows menu-driven execution or batch execution of services.
Call services in synchronous or asynchronous mode.
Automatically creates a customizable UI based on the data contract.
Encapsulates code to operate on the appropriate tier (prompting on the client tier, and business logic on the server tier).

6. Components
DataContract
Controller
Service class
UIBuilder

7. Example

8. Sequence

9. BOF in Services Methods Diaglog() GetFromDialog() PutToDialog()
Prompt()
Run()
Main()
Member variables
pack/unpack methods

10. BOF Service
Demo

11. How to create a BOF service?
To create a Business Operation Framework service, the following steps must be performed:
Create a data contract class
Identify the parameters passed to the service
Register the class as a Business Operation Framework service
Optionally customize the automatically generated UI for the class

12. What are the ways to customize UI?
Attribute based customizations.
Attributes are SysOperationGroupAttribute, SysOperationGroupMemberAttribute, SysOperationDisplayOrderAttribute,
SysOperationLabelAttribute,
SysOperationHelpTextAttribute etc.
Code based customizations.
Using UIBuilder class. For example check CustRecurrenceInvoiceUIBuilder Class.

13. DataContract Validate DataContract at design time
To perform validation on contract class, you need to implement SysOperationValidatable Interface and override the validate method. For example of this, check CustRecurrenceInvoiceDataContract class.
Modify DataContract at run time
To modify the contract at runtime, we need to create a controller class extend from SysOperationServiceController class.
Get the contract object by calling the method getDataContractObject from controller class instance and then call the corresponding parm methods of contract class, passing the desired values.

14. Calling a BOF service
A Business Operation Framework service can be called in four ways:
As a menu item
Create an Action Menu Item
Set the ObjectType to Class
Set the Object to SysOperationServiceController
Set the Parameters to <ServiceClassName>.<MethodName>
As a batch process
Create a job and create the service method in that job
Synchronously
To run the service synchronously, edit the menu item, set EnumTypeParameter=SysOperationExecutionMode; EnumParameter=Synchronous
Asynchronously
To run the service synchronously, edit the menu item, set EnumTypeParameter=SysOperationExecutionMode; EnumParameter=ASynchronous

15. BOF in Reports
AX 2012 report programming model is build on SysOperation Framework
In AX2012, we have 2 options to develop reports
Modeled solution aka query based
Code based solution aka Report data provider based

16. View: SrsReportDataContractUIBuilder Model: SrsReportDataContract/SrsReportDataProviderBase
Controller: SrsReportRunController