**Quick Version**
Is there a clean / recommended way to amend an AX Date field to an AX UtcDateTime field?
**Long Version**
We recently ran the LifeCycle Services (LCS) Customisation Analysis tool on our model, and passed the results to our developers to correct. A common warning was the use of non UTC date/time fields; i.e. "Field %1 of table %2 is not UTC compliant".
Since we've been using our code in production for a while now, there's data in the associated tables, so the developers are stating that they can't safely change the field to a UTC date.
My assumption would have been that you could simply change the type of the field to a UtcDateTime, and AX would keep the same data in the database's DateTime column, and create an entry in the DateTimeTZID (int) column with the default value (37001).
That said, looking in the AOT I couldn't see a simple option for amending the type from Date to UtcDateTime, so I imagine it's more complex than I'd thought. It would be possible to rename the date field prefixing with DEL_, create the new field with the correct name, then in SQL copy values from one to the other, but presumably all AX code would still refer to the DEL_ field internally (i.e. despite the rename, it would still have the same object id)?
As well as AX, we need to consider our BI solution. They're less concerned by timezones (at present) / would be happy with the approximate datetime value ignoring the timezone component; so our only real concern there would be ensuring the field name didn't change.
Is there a clean / recommended way to amend an AX Date field to an AX UtcDateTime field?
Thanks in advance,
JB
