AX7 – Batch Service And How To Debug It

In this post I’ll shortly tell you about the batch service in development (and other one-box-) environments and what you need to do to debug it.

The Batch Service

Back in AX 2012 you were able to (and actually needed to) define one or more AOS as Batch AOS. So batch jobs were executed there. In the new Microsoft Dynamics AX this is different. In case of development environments (and assumingly all one-box-topologies now and in future) there is a Windows Service installed that executes batch jobs. It’s name is
Microsoft Dynamics AX Batch Management Service
and you find it (amongst other ways, of course) in the Services via the Windows Start Menu. So if you need to shut down the AOS / IIS you want to stop this service, too. If you are told to restart the AOS, go there and restart the batch service as well

Debugging

Sometimes you need to debug certain batch job execution situations. In AX 2012 you would have attached Visual Studio to the AOS‘ process and debug the IL code. It’s pretty much the same still and got even easier because X++ now is a .NET language. So navigate to Debug / Attach To Process… in Visual Studio and make sure to select Show processes from all users. The batch service has the obvious name Batch.exe (its location is C:\CustomerServiceUnit\DOBind\Packages\Cloud\AosWebApplication\AosWebApplication.csx\roles\AosWeb\approot\bin – at least on locally deployed machines and this is only for informational purposes, usually you won’t need to know). Attach to that process and you should be able to debug the X++ code that is executed there.