An Introduction to Client Surrogate Keys in Microsoft Dynamics A...

Microsoft Dynamics

AX

White Paper

This paper defines surrogate keys in the context of Microsoft

Dynamics AX and describes how they can be displayed to the

user in the client.

October 2012

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AN INTRODUCTION TO SURROGATE KEY REPLACEMENT IN MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX 2012

Table of Contents

MorphX objects and X++ classes ................................................................ 6

Example 5: Using a Reference Data Source to display additional read-only data from a related

Appendix A: SharedProject_ReferenceGroupSample_1 ............................. 21

Appendix B: SharedProject_ReferenceGroupSample_2 ............................. 30

Appendix C: SharedProject_ReferenceGroupSample_3 ............................. 39

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AN INTRODUCTION TO SURROGATE KEY REPLACEMENT IN MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX 2012

is typically used in place of a set of fields, called the natural key, which would normally act as the

primary key of a table.

Surrogate keys have the following properties:

The RecId data type (64-bit integer) exhibits these properties and therefore is the surrogate key for

Microsoft Dynamics AX. In this paper, surrogate keys exist on a primary key table.

A surrogate foreign key is a foreign key that relates one table to another by using a surrogate key. In

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AN INTRODUCTION TO SURROGATE KEY REPLACEMENT IN MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX 2012

Surrogate foreign keys are modeled in the Application Object Tree (AOT), under Data Dictionary >

Tables.

The first thing to note when you attempt to create a surrogate foreign key is that the related primary

key table must be using a surrogate key, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2—Sample surrogate foreign key Relation property sheet

Right-click the newly created and configured Relation, and then click New > New Foreign Key. You

should see something similar to Figure 3.

Figure 3 Sample surrogate foreign key Relation

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AN INTRODUCTION TO SURROGATE KEY REPLACEMENT IN MICROSOFT DYNAMICS AX 2012

Note that the creation of a surrogate foreign key relationship automatically adds a field to the foreign

key table for you.

Displaying surrogate keys