Question

I was importing some entities to AX 2012 using AIF and consuming the web services through an C# ASP.Net application.
I already made it for Customers,Vendors,Workers,Chart of Accounts and now starting General Journals.

Some customization I could find a workaround using the AIF Document Service Wizard:
Creating the DUNS number using a service for the DirDunsNumber table, later associating the customer with the new created DUNS Number.
On the Products data migration will need a lot of customization like this.

This month I heard the annoucement that there is this new framework (Data Migration Framework), still in beta version.

I would like to know if the Data Migration Framework would cover all of these customizations ?
What are the advantages of this new framework over AIF ?

Answer 1

The advantage over the AIF. Then I assume you are referring to the Document services. Well the first big difference is the purpose of the two frameworks:

DMF is to do migration of lots of data and should be built to handle the import of data efficiently (I repeat ‘should’ because until now the whole DMF code is not quite optimized for performance ‘as is’) It is using SQL Server to import the data into staging tables which should be faster than AIF.

AIF is to build services to integrate with Ax and is more intended to handle ‘messages’ instead of doing migrations. The big disadvantage of the AIF is the fomat (it uses soap XML and is validated by a schema which requires the messages to be in certain formatting where you as a developer have less control) Also, AIF in my opinion causes overhead and is not that transparant as a framework. For example you have to do some performance optimizations like caching the number of decimals of EDT’s because it takes too long)

In your case I would go with Custom Services. The can be built and deployed relatively easy as opposed to AIF services and you have more control over the Data contracts you are providing to be used.

So in short:

• Use the DMF to do migration and import of large data sets
• Use Custom services to provide services to communicate to Dynamics AX 2012. These are WCF services and thus well known by non-AX developers
• Use AIF if you are forced to do so 😉

If you want to read about AIF (and Dynamics AX 2012 services in general) , you can have a look at a book that I wrote together with a collegue of mine : Dynamics AX 2012 Services