Using a Query in a SysOperation Data Contract Class in Dynamics AX 2012

Published: October 29, 2020 at 5:06:05 PM UTC

This article goes over the details on how to add a user-configurable and filterable query to a SysOperation data contract class in Dynamics AX 2012 (and Dynamics 365 for Operations)

The information in this post is based on Dynamics AX 2012 R3. It may or may not be valid for other versions. (Update: I can confirm that this also works on Dynamics 365 for Operations)

I always seem to forget the details on how to specify and initialize a query in the SysOperation framework. I guess that most of the batch jobs I've been making aren't based on user-configurable queries, but every now and then I do need to make such a batch job, so this post is also for my own reference.

First, in the data contract class, the query will be stored packed in a string. Its parm method must be decorated with the AifQueryTypeAttribute attribute, like so (in this example I've used the SalesUpdate query, but you can replace this with any AOT query):

[
    DataMemberAttribute,
    AifQueryTypeAttribute('_packedQuery', queryStr(SalesUpdate))
]
public str parmPackedQuery(str _packedQuery = packedQuery)
{
    ;

    packedQuery = _packedQuery;
    return packedQuery;
}

If you want the query to be decided by the controller class instead, you can also use an empty string. In that case, you also need to implement a couple of helper methods (which you probably should implement anyway for your own convenience when you need to access the query):

public Query getQuery()
{
    ;

    return new Query(SysOperationHelper::base64Decode(packedQuery));
}

public void setQuery(Query _query)
{
    ;

    packedQuery = SysOperationHelper::base64Encode(_query.pack());
}

If you need to initialize the query (for example, add ranges), you should implement an initQuery method:

public void initQuery()
{
    Query queryLocal = this.getQuery();
    ;

    // add ranges, etc...

    this.setQuery(queryLocal);
}

You need to make sure to call this method from the controller class.