If you've worked with Microsoft Dynamics AX for a while, you will know that it contains many tables with a lot of data. These tables can be related to each other to form logical entities such as sales orders. Tables not only contain fields, indexes, and relations, but they also contain code that handles initialization, validation, and manipulation of data. When you send data from Microsoft Dynamics AX but especially when you receive data from external systems, you want all of the business logic that is contained in these tables and entities to be executed for data to be consistent. It would be troublesome to have to code all of this yourself when creating a service. Fortunately, AIF solves this by providing a framework and the tools to create these services.
So what are these tools and components? That's exactly what we will discuss next.
