Thursday 9 November 2006

Add ons and the falacy of layers

The layers in Ax are a great addition to the product they enable you the user to install and maintain code in distinct files and thereby to ensure that you get a more stable system as an end user.

Where does the wheel fall off ?

Well the problem is that there are any number of add-ons availeable for Ax and they all require a place to be stored, furthermore Microsoft itself is a big consumer of layers and a generator of what I will call layer collisions.

An example of a layer collision in V3 is if you wish to install a site in Poland and another accross the border in Germany, and you wish to use some of the nifty intercompany functionality to better manage that manufacturing plant in Poland :-).

Well the bad news is you cannot as you have to have 2 distinct instances of Ax as the DIS/DIP layers for Poland (part of CE DIS Layer) and Germany (Part of the WEMEA DIS Layer) are not compatible.

What does this mean:

You have 2 choices:

1. Do the dev work yourself to merge the two :-(, and redo this every time MS brings out a new version.

2. Create 2 instances and drop any notion of automated stock lookups, intercompany etc.

Fortunately this will for these 2 countries no longer be the case after Version 4.01 where the localisations should be made availeable, at least for a while. The reason is that all the WEMEA localisations are now in the SYS/SYP layers.

However it is still the case if you wish to use India / Brazil and a long list of other countries with any Eastern European countries.

Further to this I have a general cristicism concerning the localised code as it does not really follow what I would call the minimum best practices neecssary to have a healthy localised system installed anywhere.

More about this later with some examples and also guidelines that I would think Microsoft should implement in their GDL (Global Development Localisation) teams that create this localisation code.

/Sven

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