AX 2012 - Security Tools Review

I hope everyone is doing well this week, and finding yourself in a very productive mood, diving deeper and deeper into your AX projects. I wanted to take the time, and highlight an Context Menu Add-in, for AX 2012, specifically the Security Tools that appear when highlighting certain objects in the AOT.



When talking about security in AX 2012, it's important to understand what securable objects within the application are related to what Duties, Roles and more.



To help us understand how the secureable objects in AX 2012, are related to specific privileges, through duties and roles, Microsoft comes with out-of-the-box offerings, that help us in this effort. This is what we see in the first image of this post, showing where, highlighting for example, the SalesTable table object, right clicking and then highlighting security tools, and finally clicking on the View related security roles. In doing this action, a similar screen as shown below is displayed.



There are many fields in this, for helping us understand how the specific element we have highlighted, related back up through the security model in AX 2012. As the following screen shot, further shows even more of the helpful information, for understanding the securable objects relations.



You can see, that like any other form in AX, that has a grid control, you can filter by grid, to get to needed specific information, like type of security, if it's related to form controls, etc. What's also great, and this is again throughout the AX application, the ability to take the data within the specific grid control, and easily export that to Excel, for further analysis and reporting.



Clicking on the export to excel, and we can see quickly and start working with the security related information for the element.



This then, helps in the design phases, as well as post development, within the operation of AX, to understand and glimpse into the current setup from the Role, down to the duty level of the security artifacts that exsit now as part of any AX 2012 instance. This again is powered, out-of-the-box, through the content menu. You can better understand what other functions exists as part of these Security Tools context menu in AX 2012, by going to the Menu's node, in the AOT tree. From there navigate to the SysContextMenu element, and expand the Security Tools node.



With this information, understanding what exist around security for specific elements of AX, be that out-of-the-box or custom, becomes a lot easier. This translate further, into helping make the term, powerfully simple, a true one. To add more value to this topic, if your interested in understanding more about how to work, and add your own scope to the context menu in AX, I recommend checking out the following resource page on MSDN: How to: Add Items to the AOT Add-Ins Menu [AX 2012]

Well, that's all for this post, check back soon as I have a lot more coming, including the continue dive into AX 2012, BI, Data Management, Services, Ecosystem and a whole lot more! Till next time!

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