"No cost rollup is found for this item. Activate the item cost price"

Recently while working on setting up an environment for a customer using AX 2012 CU7, I came across the error "No cost rollup is found for this item. Activate the item cost price". Typically you get this issue when you have standard cost items with no active prices. In our case we set up all the prices for cost/purchasing/sales and activated for all sites for a standard cost item, yet we were not able to receive a purchase order with this standard cost item. We kept getting this error message. Below is how I resolved this issue:

1. Make sure that the "BOMCostBreakDown" configuration key is active. Although, in our environment we were not using BOM, yet - I think due to a bug - AX requires for this configuration key in order to overcome this issue. Go to System Administration -> Setup -> Licensing -> License Configuration

          BomCostBreakDown configuration key is located under Trade->Bill of Materials.

2. Reactivate Item prices for all the standard cost items. This will populate InventItemPrice and InventItemCostGroupRollup tables.  Prices were missing in InventItemCostGroupRollup table which was causing this issue.

Recent AX issues I came across and resolved

1- Parameter 'AX_RdpPreProcessedId' does not exist on this report
While creating "GL->Reports->Journals->General journal entries that have not been posted " report I received an error message "Parameter 'AX_RdpPreProcessedId' does not exist on this report". First thing that needs to be done to remedy such issues is to re-deploy the report. That worked for me. First to find out the name of report, I opened AOT, and navigated under the Menu to find out the report I was interested in. Usually the menu item name is same as report name.

After finding out the report name, I looked into SSRS Reports/Reports to find my report. I right clicked the report and then clicked Deploy Element - which re-deployed the report to AOS.

2- "Error while setting server report"

Another issue that I came across while creating any report was the following access issue. 

For instance, when I wanted to create the General Ledger/Reports/Base Data/Chart of Accounts report I received this infolog. 

"Error while setting server report parameters. Error message: the permissions granted to user YYY are insufficient for performing the operation. (rsAccessDenied)"

The issue is related to User Access Control (UAC) and accessing SSRS from the same server on which it’s installed. So, if you are logged into a server where UAC is enabled and attempt to access the SSRS url (whether directly through IE or via the AX client), you may receive this issue. In order to resolve the issue the application that accesses this URL should be run with elevated privileges. In order to resolve this for AX client, close it and re-open it by right-clicking the AX client shortcut and running it as administrator. You can configure the AX shortcut to Run as administrator by default by right clicking the properties of that shortcut and selecting the "Run this program as an administrator" checkbox under Compatibility tab.

3- Back dating the effective date of an organization hierarchy

In one of my client's AX 2012 R2 environment  the main organization hierarchy was created effective as of mid 2013. At a later time, they uploaded transactions for year 2012 and ran reports from Management Reporter for these historic transactions. Since the main organization hierarchy was not effective for year 2012, the reports did not run. They asked me to back date the effective date of the organization hierarchy without a need to re-create it. In AOT I found the tables that are related to organization hierarchy which has effective date field and manually changed those dates to 1/1/2012. I changed the effective date in these tables: OMExplodedOrganizationSecurityGraph, OMHierarchyChangeLog, OMHierarchyRelationship. Doing this successfully changed the effective date of the organization hierarchy and enabled the customer to create reports in Management Report for year 2012. However this fix had a very strange side effect. After this change, we realized that all the main accounts and dimension values suspended. And manually un-selecting the suspend checkbox did not help. In AOT I opened the DimensionAttributeValue table that contains all the dimension values. I realized that there is a new field introduced in this table - DimensionStatus. This field does not exist under the table description and did not exist before prior to effective date change of the organization hierarchy. This field was set to "Inactive" for all the values in DimensionAttributeValue table. Changing this field to "Active" resolved our issue.

AX 2012 Excel add-in upload issue

While uploading journal entries using Microsoft Excel Add-in for AX, we received the following error message:
Function DimensionDefaultingEngine::constructForMainAccountId has been incorrectly called. Document General Journals could not be created. Error details: Function DimensionDefaultingEngine::constructForMainAccountId has been incorrectly called.

This issue was caused by a ledger account that does not exist in any of the account structures. It was not a very meaningful error message, especially compared to the one that throws when a ledger account is missing from the ledger.

I have seen another hard to identify issue regarding to the same cause, in service order postings. Whenever a new ledger account is created, the user is better to double check the account structures to verify that the account is covered by one of the account structures in order to avoid hard to resolve meaningless errors that can occur.

MCITP Certification for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

I inquired about MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional) Certification for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 requirements to Dynamics Certification Team and here is the answer I got:

From: Dynamics-cert <mbs-cert@microsoft.com>
Date: Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: Requirements for Microsoft Certified IT Professional for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 (KMM25790854V79029L0KM)
To: Altan Kalayci <altanka@gmail.com>

Hello Altan,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft about MCITP certification on Dynamics AX 2012.

I can understand your concern in this regards.

Having checked the details I found that the MCITP Certification on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is not released. Hence, the exam requirements for this certification are not available yet. Once this certification will be released, you will be able to find this information on Microsoft Learning website.

Currently, we do not have any information regarding the release date of this certification.

If there is anything else we can do for you, please let us know. Thank you for using Microsoft.

Juned
mbs-cert@microsoft.com
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/using/training.mspx
Tel: 1-800-456-0025, Option #4
Monday through Friday
6:30am to 5:30pm Pacific Time

Suggestions on Year End Closing and Trial Balance Report

Recently one of my customers complained about having zero (0) opening balances on the Trial Balance report for Balance Sheet accounts after year end closing process ran. Here are the suggestions and tips I had for him which might be useful for general audience.

1-  Closing Process Suggestions

a.      ” Close-of-year transactions” report under GL>Reports>Transactions can be used to see all the transactions occurred during the closing process. 

 

b.      Suggestions on the “GL>Periodic>Fiscal Year Close> Opening Transactions” process

                                                               i.      Enter a voucher number manually in the process. That makes it easier to track the transactions later.

                                                             ii.      Do no select “Use account for transfer of year-end result”. This checkbox is supposed to only show up if your primary address is Spain. Probably due to a bug, it shows up here. It is removed in the new R2 version. However, selecting or de-selecting it has no effect – yet I suggest not to select it.

                                                            iii.      As you see in the Opening Transactions form below the customer has a parameter setting to set the fiscal year status to “closed” automatically after the closing process finishes. This is coming from General Ledger parameters (please refer to suggestion 1-c)

c.       In “GL > Setup > General ledger parameters” under Fiscal Year Close fast tab – unselect the “Set Fiscal Year Status to closed” checkbox. Because this automatically sets the fiscal year status to closed after the process completes and a “closed” period cannot be “re-opened”. For instance, if there was an issue during this closing process and if you would like to rerun the Opening Transactions, you will not be able to run it in this case since the periods are already closed. Alternatively, you can set the status for fiscal periods to “On Hold” which prevents further transactions but also enables you to reopen if need be. (open GL>Setup>Ledger and click “Ledger Calendar” button which opens the Ledger Calendar form where you can set the status manually.

2-      Trial Balance Suggestions

a.       Do not forget to Update Balances before running a trial balance report. Prior to running a Trial Balance report go to “GL>Setup>Financial Dimensions>Financial Dimension sets” and click the “Update balances” button after selecting the financial dimension set you are going to be using in your TB report.

b.      This final suggestion explains why the Trial Balance report shows 0 opening balances even after updating the balances. This is kind of tricky. I personally think the name of the check box “Include opening”  is not intuitive and is misleading. If you select your Detail Level as “Summary”, then do not select “Include Opening” or “Include Closing” if you would like to see opening and closing balances reported in the summary header. These check boxes are meant to include opening and closing transactions in the transaction list when a “detailed” TB report is prepared.  Here is an explanation from MS what those checkboxes mean:

                               Based on these explanations, I think what you would like to do is to uncheck those options. And then you will get the following TB report:

                              Here is the result with opening balances reported as non-zero for the balance sheet account:

            

                             

AX 2012 R2 Demo - Help Server Issue

If you have installed AX 2012 R2 Demo Image to Hyper-V and received the following error message while opening help

"The location of the help server has not been specified. Contact your system administrator for assistance"

you need the set the "Help Service URL" in Help System Parameters - under System Administration > SetUp > System. The typical help service URL is "http://<host:port>/DynamicsAX6HelpServer/HelpService.svc" on Port 80. The host on the R2 Image is "DynamicsHelpServer".

AX 2012 R2 Enterprise Portal not working on VM image on VirtualBox

If you have installed the AX 2012 R2 demo on VirtualBox and the Enterprise Portal or Role Center is not working, the fix might be as simple as editing the Hosts file. Here is the issue I received when I clicked Home link on Dynamics AX 2012 rich client.

In order to resolve this issue, I edited the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\Hosts file in a text editor and added the following two lines

127.0.0.1       dynamicsax.contoso.com
127.0.0.1       sharepoint

Here is how it looks like

Couple of users noted that the fix above alone did not make their Enterprise Portal work. On top of the fix above you may need to change the binding in IIS manager.

1- Open IIS manager and navigate to Sites\DynamicsAX.
2- Go to Actions->Bindings.
3- Change the ip address to 127.0.0.1.

This may take a few minutes the first time to start.
Thanks to Alok Joshi for this insight which he quoted it from Arttu Vuorinen.