MS ERPs, Dynamics AX, AIF, X++, Sharepoint, Biztalk Server, SRS, .Net: How to use CLR Interop with Dynamics Ax 4.0

This article will explain you how to use CLR Interop with Dynamics Ax 4.0.

Write your business logic in .Net environment and use that within Dynamics Ax.

It assume that you are familiar with Microsoft Dynamics Ax and Visual Studio .Net
You should have Ax 4.0 & Visual Studio .Net installed on your system.
There is No warranty on this article, use at your own risk. If it’s useful then refer to others.

.NET CLR Interop Overview
Classes in assemblies that are managed by the common language runtime (CLR) can be accessed in X++ code. This feature of Microsoft Dynamics AX is called common language runtime (CLR) interoperability, or CLR interop.
The CLR interop feature works only in the direction from X++ calling into CLR managed assemblies. It does not support calling X++ classes from a CLR managed assembly.
CLR interop is useful when you want your X++ code to access the functionalities in a CLR managed assembly.

1.
Open Visual Studio and create a new project. During creating a new project area, choose programming language Visual C# and template Class library. I have given the project name TalkToDotNet.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

2.
By default you will get a standard class template as below:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace TalkToDotNet
{
public class Class1
{
}
}

3.
Now add the following lines within Class1
public string CombinedMsg(string _msg)
{
string message1;
message1 = _msg;
return message1 + "From .Net: I am fine";
}

After addition the above lines the class1 will look like:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace TalkToDotNet
{
public class Class1
{
public string CombinedMsg(string _msg)
{
string message1;
message1 = _msg;
return message1 + "From .Net: I am fine";
}
}

}

The above class is having a method called CombinedMsg which takes a string parameter and add "From .Net: I am fine" string with the parameter string.

4.
Now go to the project explorer window and select the project. Right click on the project and click on Properties. You will get the window as below.

Figure 3.

5.
Click on Signing Tab and then check the check box Sign the assembly.

Figure 4.

6. Choose New from the drop down box as shown below.

Figure 5.

7.
It will ask you for user id and password to protect your business logic. This is optional. You may ignore.

Figure 6.

8.
Click on Build menu then Build Solution.

Figure 7.

If any error is there then you will be prompted otherwise you will get the successful message. Now copy the dll from your project area and paste it to Bin directory of your Ax client folder.

9.
Now open your Ax application.

10.
Open AOT, select the References node and right click on it. On the context menu click on Add reference.

Figure 8.

11.
You will get the window as below. Click on Browse button and go to the Bin folder of your Ax client folder.

Figure 9.

Figure 10.

Figure 11.

12.
See the dll is added.

Figure 12.

13.
The dll is now added in the references node of AOT.

Figure 13.

14.
Now create a job in Ax and call the dll.

Figure 14.

Figure 15.

15.
The job is as below.

Figure 16.

static void TalkToDotNet(Args _args)
{
str strval;
TalkToDotNet.Class1 testCls = new TalkToDotNet.Class1();
strval = testCls.CombinedMsg('From Ax: How are you? ');
print strval;
pause;
}

16.

See the print message below. It takes a string message from Ax and adds it with the message returned by dll.