Extending Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Cookbook

Access your server that has SharePoint installed on it.

From the program menu, you should be able to find the SharePoint Central Administration Console in the Microsoft SharePoint Products group.

When you open the application, you should see a screen similar to this:

From your SharePoint Central Administration console, navigate to the Application Management group.

Select the Create Site Collection from the Site Collections group.

Name your application My Sites.

Set the website address to be in the my/personal folder, and name the subfolder My Sites.

From the Enterprise tab on the Template selection choose My Site Host.

Don’t forget to assign the Primary and Secondary administrators to the site that you are creating:

Click on OK to create your site.

From the Application Management option in Central Administration, select the site that we added the My Sites host site to.

Click on the Define button in the ribbon bar, and then select the Managed Paths option:

Here we will add our new My Site link. You don’t need to type in the full URL, so you can skip the host prefix.

Also, you may just want to check the Self-Service Site Creation option, to make sure that the feature is turned On:

Finally, we need to configure the User Profile Service application.

When you select the application, you will be able to see all of the My Site and user profile configuration options. From here you need to choose the Setup My Site menu option.

We just need to configure the site parameters, the administrator users, and so on.

From within the Role Center, click on the Personalize this page link in the top-right hand corner to enter into the edit mode.

Click on the Add a Web Part link where you would like to add the note board.

This will open up the web part explorer. From the categories, select the Social Collaboration group and this will filter the available web parts to the My Site controls.

Select the Note Board control and click on the Add button:

Now click on the Stop Editing button to return to the view mode for the Role Center.

From within the Role Center, click on the Personalize this page link in the top-right hand corner to enter into the edit mode.

Click on the Add a Web Part link where you would like to add your contact information.

This will open up the web part explorer. From the categories, select the Social Collaboration group and this will filter the available web parts to the My Site controls.

Navigate to the Contact Details control, and then click on the Add button:

This will add the Contact Details web part to the Role Center, but you need to configure it with a contact. To do that, navigate to Click here to add or modify a contact link.

This will open up the Web Part properties panel, and you will be able to select a contact from the address book:

Click on the Stop Editing button and you are done.

Access the site, and open up the Site Actions menu. You need to make sure that you have the ability to create a New Document Library:

From your SharePoint site that you want to store your documents in, access the Site Actions menu, and then select the New Document Library menu item:

This will open up the Document Library creation form. Give the library a name for the area of the business that will be using the documents, and then click on the Create button:

Now you should have a generic document library. We want to be able to index and search through our documents though. So we will add a few index fields to the document library. To do this, click on the Create Column button in the Library/Manage Views section of the ribbon bar:

This will open up the Create Column dialog box, and we will create a column for Vendor Account Number:

After doing that, create non-required columns for Invoice Number (AccountNum), Document Amount (Amount), Document Date (Date), Purchase Order Number (PurchaseOrder), and Company ID (Company).

From the Library/Manage Views tab on the ribbon bar, you may also want to rearrange and hide the columns to make the library tidier.

Open up the form that you are going to modify.

Right-click on the form and navigate to the Personalize option.

Click on the Information tab and you should be able to see the system form name:

Click on the Edit button to the right of the form name and you should be taken into the AOT development environment.

Create a new development project in AOT, AccountsPayableSharePointDocs. Add the VendorTable form to the project:

We are going to add a new tab group to the VendorTable form to show the documents that relate to the Vendor record. To do that expand the Designs group and find the Design form definition. Expand MainTab and TabPageDetails, and then right-click on the Tabs group, navigate to New Control, and then TabPage:

Rename TabPage to AccountsPayableDocuments and also add a caption for TabPage in the properties box of Vendor Documents.

We need to add a browser to the form so that we can display the SharePoint documents window. To do this, right-click on the new tab that we created, navigate to the New Control menu, and then select the ActiveX control.

When the ActiveX control browser shows up, navigate to the Microsoft Web Browser control, and add it to the tab.

In the properties panel for the Web Browser control, set the Name property to Documents, set the Width property to Column width, and the Height property to Column height, so that the control will fill the space that is available in the tab control:

Now that we have a control to show the SharePoint site with the documents, we just need to initialize it when entering the vendor form. To do this, right-click on the Methods group in the VendTable form, select the Override method menu, and then activate:

Code Snippet 1: VendTable Form activate method

This will open up the code editor for the activate method. We will change this by creating a URL string that references the Accounts Payable document library in SharePoint, and then navigate the browser control to the URL, as follows:

public void activate(boolean _active)
{
    String255 url = “http://intranet.contoso.com/
      Accounts%20Payable%20Documents/Forms/
        AllItems.aspx?IsDlg=1”;

    url = url + “&FilterField1=AccountNum&
      FilterValue1=” + VendTable.AccountNum;
    url = url + “&FilterField2=Company&
      FilterValue2=” + VendTable.dataAreaId;
    Documents.Navigate(url);

    super(_active);
}

Two items to note, we added the IsDlg=1 qualifier to the URL which removes all of the navigation and gutter options on the page, and also the Filter qualifiers will automatically add a filter on the AccountNum field, and the Company indexes.

Now we can save the project, and we are finished.