AX 2012 - EP Warranty Page Navigation

I hope everyone is doing well today, and have found yourself being productive in our Dynamics based world we all live in. I wanted to continue our series today on development with EP, and a focus on our functional scope, around Warranty Management.

Last we left off, we had created a new warranty page on our enterprise portal instance. We reviewed the steps of this process, which has its focus primarily on the side of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server - site administration. The idea, for this first focus was around creating a home on EP, in which our functional scope for warranty management will mostly live.



In doing this, we selected the default template or style of our page, in which we will come back to later. Having our page created on enterprise portal is the first step for our new scope. Keep in mind, that in some cases for EP development, the functional scope might not drive you in the direction to have a custom page in which to house the new scope on.

However, with that said, the purpose of this series is to try and cover as much of EP development as possible, that you could possibly run into. Further, as I stated in the start of this series, it helps to add functional depth to such walk throughs.

Lets continue now our focus on this series, by adding navigation so that our warranty page will appear on the EP site. In order to do this, we will need to start by creating a URL menu item within Microsoft Dynamics AX itself. We do this by going to the AOT\Web\Web Menu Items location. In doing this, we will want to create ourselves a web menu item, that points to the URL for our new warranty page.



Now if you get an error message, when trying to create your web menu item, that states.: "Error in Url property error", then this is not a Dynamics AX issues, but rather a Windows issue. There is an older update needed, which my fellow blogging peer Joris point out in his article here.: Enterprise Portal Web URL Lookup Error

After having done this, we should be able to proceed with testing out our new web menu item, to see if we are pointing to the right location. In doing so we should see a screen shot, similar to the below.



Now having done this, we have a couple of options on how to proceed. We could place this as a link on the home page, but instead we want this to be it's own Web Module. We can create a Web module, for our Warranty scope, by now associating the web menu item, into our web modules group, as shown below.



You will notice in the above picture, we have placed are new web module, as a sub web module of the out-of-the-box, Home Web Module from the AOT. This will allow us to integrate nicely, our new scope, into the user experience that is expected when using EP for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. After doing this step, we can deploy our web module element, by highlighting, and right clicking on the web module itself. For good measure, as well as the same for the Home web module, as it's been updated.



A final step, after successfully deploying the web modules, is that an iisreset is required. If you do not do this, your new web module will not be displayed. This makes sense, through the nature of IIS and MOSS, however it's worth noting that it's required.

Now that we have deployed, without error, or the customized Home Web module, as well as our new Warranty Management web module, we should then see in our Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, Enterprise Portal Experience, a similar screen shot to the one below.



With this post, we have now created a navigation for our new warranty management scope, and have it deployed to our Enterprise Portal instance. We can now plan for our next steps, which is a focus around AOT management & deployment of the Warranty Home page, as well as start to add functional scope, and specific web functionality for that scope.

Well that's all for this post, I hope your enjoying our focus on EP development concepts - and that this is bringing value to your AX investment, no matter when you actually read it! Till Next Time!
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