Integrate Ecommerce Shopping Cart and Dynamics AX 2012 using Power Automate

Introduction

If you’re running your business on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 or 2012, you are no doubt aware that both software products are approaching the end of their life-cycles. Microsoft is ending Mainstream Support for Dynamics AX 2009, AX 2012, and AX 2012 R2 this year and for AX 2012 R3 in 2021. You can purchase extended support. But be aware that extended support for AX 2009, AX 2012, and AX 2012 R2 ends in 2021. For AX 2012 R3, it will be available until 2023. What are the other options? If Dynamics AX 2009 or 2012 is working well for you and provides all the functionality you need, at a performance standard you like, taking no action is one route you could choose. This set of articles aims to show you that you can keep Dynamics 2012 and still use some of nice new Microsoft tools which are out there to enhance your onpremise Dynamics.

The purpose of the following articles is to review some of these newadditions which Microsoft has introduced to the developer community and how they can be applied to older versions of Dynamics.

Microsoft has introduced the power platform, Microsoft Flow (now power automate), Power Apps and Power BI. The Data gateway another great tool to access data which may not normally be accessible online. These are great tools, but can I take advantage of them if I am running my IT system using older technologies and also running then on my server on-premise.

In the following articles I will aim to take use these new technologies and combine them with AX 2012. We’ll look at using an ecommerce example. I will use an established Ecommerce product called Nopcommerce and wire it up to Dynamics AX using Microsoft Flow. This is a nice product , I could have also used Magento or another shopping cart, but choose this one instead. 

For this example I will using the following technologies

1. AX Retail Components – Retail Server and Retail Client Sync – These will be part of the solution but I will not go into any great detail other than I will be using part of the finished product, a retail client database which contains all the data I will need for my Ecommerce store. 
2. Data Gateway – This is a product from Microsoft which allows me to access my on-premise data and allow me to access it in the Flow Platform.
3. NOPCOMMERCE – The is a .NET based shopping cart. I am going to use the latest version of the product 4.6. This is based on ASP Core. It has an option to use either MYSQL or SQL Server for a database. I will be using SQL Server option.
4. Power Automate , previously called Microsoft Flow – I will use the power automate tools to take data from one database and sync and transform it to another database. The ecommerce database.
5. Dynamics AX 2012- I will use this to setup my Retail Online channel and configure the data to move to the Retail Client and thereafter Ecommerce platform.

Setting Up the Example

Before we can get into setting up the Ecommerce store, we need to set up the following

1. Setup the Retail Sync Client and Server Components
2. Install the Data gateway
3. Install our Ecommerce store

Retail Components and the Channel Database Dynamics AX 2012

For the purposes of the article, I will use a pre-configured RetailContosoStore on the demo AX Machine. If you have the demo version of Dynamics 2012 virtual machine. This is already setup and configured. I will be taking the RetailContosoStore channel database for my product and category information.

Retail in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 includes starter stores that you can customize: the Contoso store that sells electronics and the Fabrikam store that sells clothing. The shopping cart of the solution is built on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 cross-site publishing platform. Source code and sample customizations for the starter stores are included in the Retail SDK.

For this example, I will be using the Channel database and replacing the SharePoint Ecommerce store with my own Ecommerce solution. In this case I will be using NopCommerce but you could use any other ecommerce solution like Magento.

The Async Server is set up on the VM and Async Client for data distribution in Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail R3. Commerce Data Exchange: Async Server is part of the asynchronous system that shares data between the Microsoft Dynamics AX database and channel databases.

Async Server is installed at headquarters and communicates with Microsoft Dynamics AX. In addition to Async Server, Commerce Data Exchange includes Commerce Data Exchange: Async Client, which is installed at channels and communicates with the channel database.

For this article I will use the RetailContosoStore. It already has the Retail Categories and Products congfigured in the online channel database. I will use this channel data to sync over to the Ecommerce Store.

Commerce Data Exchange is a system that transfers data between Microsoft Dynamics AX and retail channels, such as online stores or brick-and-mortar stores.

The database that stores data for a retail channel is separate from the Microsoft Dynamics AX database. A channel database holds only the data that is required for retail transactions. For a brick-and-mortar store, the channel database is also known as a store database and is typically located on the premises.

Master data is configured in Microsoft Dynamics AX and is distributed to channels. Transactional data is created in the point of sale (POS) system or the online store, and is then uploaded to Microsoft Dynamics AX. Data distribution is asynchronous. In other words, the process of gathering and packaging data at the source occurs separately from the process of receiving and applying data at the destination.

Asynchronous data exchange

The following illustration shows an overview of asynchronous data flow through Commerce Data Exchange.

If you look at the diagram above, I will be taking the Channel database as the source of information for the Ecommerce Store. This is where I will get the information for my AX Ecommerce store.

For this article I will be selecting product and category information from the Contoso channel database.