Microsoft Dynamic AX 2009 : .NET Business Connector - Usage Scenarios for .NET Business Connector

In this section, we provide several scenarios to demonstrate how you can use .NET Business Connector in real-world situations. The usage scenarios described fall into the following categories:

• Client

• Web

• Server

1. Client

In client-based scenarios, .NET Business Connector and the application that uses it are installed on a user’s computer. To make client setup easier, Dynamics AX 2009 allows the installation of just .NET Business Connector on the development machine.

Business Data Lookup Snap for Microsoft Office

The business data lookup snap is an add-in for Microsoft Office that was written using .NET Business Connector. It allows information workers to access and use Dynamics AX data from within Office applications. For example, customer information stored in Dynamics AX can be retrieved using this snap and inserted into a letter being written in Microsoft Word.

This type of integration has some specific requirements:

• It must be possible to authenticate the current user as a valid, active Dynamics AX user.

• It must be possible to take a user-selected Dynamics AX record and search string, and retrieve any matching records from Dynamics AX.

• It must be possible to copy the retrieved data into the Office application being used.

The following actions are associated with the use of .NET Business Connector for the business data lookup snap:

To find out more details about the business data lookup snap, go to the CodePlex site and search for “Snap-ins for Microsoft Dynamics AX.” Note that you must register to see the snap-ins.

PDA Synchronization Example

A potential client-based use of .NET Business Connector is for PDA synchronization. For example, you could develop an application that allows a PDA to collect information that can be uploaded to Dynamics AX. PDAs generally rely on some kind of synchronization manager; if this synchronization program is customizable, you can extend it to integrate with Dynamics AX.

The specific requirements for this type of integration follow:

• It must be possible to verify that the current Windows user matches the identity of the device owner.

• It must be possible to retrieve the data to be uploaded from the PDA or from the local file system if downloaded from the PDA.

• It must be possible to validate and insert the downloaded data into the corresponding Dynamics AX tables.

The diagram in Figure 1 illustrates the topology of this integration.

The following actions are associated with the use of .NET Business Connector during PDA synchronization:

This usage scenario shows how you could incorporate .NET Business Connector into the synchronization mechanism for a PDA, and how data entered on the PDA can be transferred to Dynamics AX. For more information on this approach, look at the mobile solutions that have been developed for Dynamics AX (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/ax/product/mobilesolutions.mspx). They include development tools for building mobile applications.

2. Web

We explained how .NET Business Connector interacts with the managed HTTP context, thus enabling Web applications, including Enterprise Portal, to access and use this context information. One of the primary processes in Enterprise Portal is page processing, which is a good example of how you can use a .NET Business Connector to enable a Web application. 

3. Server

A final usage scenario uses .NET Business Connector on the server that hosts the AOS and the Dynamics AX database, as shown in Figure 2.

In this scenario, a non-Web-based managed application uses .NET Business Connector to integrate with Dynamics AX. This approach can be used for a variety of purposes, but one example is offline processing. Typically, a Dynamics AX user must be logged on to a computer to authenticate in Dynamics AX. In some cases, this isn’t possible. For example, the asynchronous integration offered by the AIF doesn’t require the originating user to be logged on to the machine where data is processed and inserted into Dynamics AX. However, this task must be executed using the correct user identity.

The solution is to use .NET Business Connector to impersonate a Dynamics AX user, which you can do in one of three ways:

• Use the Logon API method and supply the original user’s credentials, assuming they are known and maintained securely.

• Use the LogonAs API method and supply the credentials of the .NET Business Connector proxy user. The .NET Business Connector proxy user is a specifically created domain account used by the user impersonation mechanism in .NET Business Connector. For more details about this, review the online Help section “How to: Connect to Microsoft Dynamics AX Using the LogonAs Method.”

• Execute .NET Business Connector in a Windows process owned by the .NET Business Connector proxy user, and then call the LogonAs API method.

If you use one of these methods to log on to .NET Business Connector, you can develop server-based applications that can process data using the correct Dynamics AX user identity.