AX 2012 - Report Programming Guide / MVC

I hope everyone is doing well, and ready to get back into the swing of things. If your like me, you enjoyed the long weekend, but ready to get back to a normal schedule. This time of year is always busy, and we have so much to cover for the Dynamics Ecosystem, as well as specifics around Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

With that, I thought I would start off this week, with a focus around a tweet I saw on my way to the airport this Monday morning. I saw the following asked: "Is the new AX 2012 Reporting Development model based on MVC Design Pattern?" The short answer to this question, is Yes!.

For those that are familiar with the concepts behind MVC, or Model-View-Controller, then this is a great move in reporting. If your not that familiar with the MVC concepts, wikipedia.org has a great little stub home for this topic.: Wikipedia.org MVC Home.



"Model–view–controller (MVC) is a software architecture,[1] currently considered an architectural pattern used in software engineering. The pattern isolates "domain logic" (the application logic for the user) from the user interface (input and presentation), permitting independent development, testing and maintenance of each (separation of concerns).

Model View Controller (MVC) pattern creates applications that separate the different aspects of the application (input logic, business logic, and UI logic), while providing a loose coupling between these elements."

Now, lets get to the specifics for Dynamics AX 2012, around this concept and how this design pattern is applied for reporting. First off, the following will give you a high level understanding of how the MVC pattern maps to real concepts, and class frameworks in AX 2012, as well as a link to the recently released programming guide for AX 2012.: MSDN: Reporting Programming Guide [AX 2012].

Model: SrsReportDataContractUIBuilder
View: SrsReportDataContract
Controller: SrsReportRunController

Finally, you have the following which is a direct link to download the Report Programming Guide for AX 2012: [AX 2012] Report Programming Guide

I will be spending a lot of time around reporting, as well as the overall BI story for AX 2012. For now, this is a good start, and I thought a good way to start the week. Focused on the answer to a question, with some great resource information from Microsoft. Yes, the reporting programming modeling in AX 2012 is based around MVC.

Till next time!

"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"

SSRS Reports URL - Performance issue on 64 bit with SQL Server 2005

Something I recently came across on an Dynamics AX 2009 instance, was a SSRS reports URL, performance issue.

This is also referred to as the reports manager URL, it's the http://server/reports URL.

What I saw was that the reports URL would be working fine, and then after some time of being idle, the worker process that runs that URL in IIS 7.0 would of course get destroyed to free that RAM up.

On start back up, of that worker process, the reports URL would enver return. Closer details show, this is a thread error taking place.

After much search, and working with the Microsoft SSRS Performance Development group, a solution was found. We had to modify the machine.config, found in the .Net 2.0 Framework, to set the min. thread workers.

After seeing this work, turns out this is now a know bug by the Microsoft SSRS development group, with performance. This has only been seen on SQL Server 2005 64-bit Edt. running on Windows Server 2003 or 2008 64 bit edt. with *greater* than 4 processors. (4 processors or lower this does not show up.)

Turns out the code, for the SSRS service handles this fine, the processor affinity masking. However the code for the reports URL, does not.

So if you run into this, there is a fix, and Microsoft should be coming up with a fix for this in SQL Server 2005 SP4 and I am sure a hot fix before then.

This has not been seen in SQL Server 2008 code base.

Well check back later, more great post to come!




"Visit the Dynamics AX Community Page today!"