Dynamics AX 4.0 Meta Model

If you are a new developer and is trying to ramp up on AX, this might be a post for you. In MorphX (the IDE for AX) you do model-driven development. This basically means you create new elements of certain concepts, decorate them with properties, and wire them all together. Naturally there will be requirements to your features that cannot be expressed in the model, in these cases you have to resort to writing X++ code.

Let's return to modeling. In the AOT (Application Object Tree) you will find a lot of modeling concepts, such as Forms, Tables, Extended Data Types etc. The AOT is quite good as a dictionary of concepts, but how do they relate?   For Inside Dynamics AX 4.0 we created the below overview diagrams to answer this question. After the book has been through editing the diagrams were chopped up. This gives a better details view, but the overview was lost. But not anymore.

Read each arrow as "using". For example. A Menu uses Menu Items. A Menu Item uses a Form. A Form uses a Table. A Table uses Extended Data Types. And so on.

I've attach a Microsoft Office Visio version of the diagrams to this post as well for your convenience.

The win client version:

The web client version:

AX40MetaModel.vsd