How to update cross-reference in batch

As you can see in AX 2012 updating cross references is not a batch job any more. But is worth setting it up to be run automatically during the night.

There is the article on MSDN describing this subject but without a batch, and if it looks too complicated for you, as for me, I would suggest another way found on AXForum (in Russian).

Once you started cross-reference updating from the client, you can easily find this job in Batch Job menu.

As we can see it is xRefUpdateIL class used for this goal, that in turn runs UpdateAll method.

So, it is possible to create your own job or batchable class to run, but we can just change the recurrence and set up other parameters, like alerts, for the ended batch job and change then its status to Waiting.

The same is true for partial reference update, say, for certain tables and classes of a project.

Happy cross-reference updating!

Clean off the illegal characters from file name

When it comes to use file names, say, in saving reports on the disk or sending them as an attachment, they must conform OS restrictions.

Although we cannot rely on GetInvalidFileNameChars function due to its limitation, it is easy to create your own procedure that clean off the illegal characters from the given file name.

In my example I use a regular expression and a set of characters that should be replaced with the underscore by default.

/// <summary>
/// Checks for invalid characters in the filename and changes them with underscore.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="_fileName">
/// The file name value.
/// </param>
/// <param name="_char2use">
/// The character to use instead of illegal characters. Underscore by default.
/// </param>
/// <returns>
/// valid file name
/// </returns>

static client str makeFileNameValid(str _fileName, str 1 _char2use = "_")
{
    str                 pattern = "[/:*?'<>|]";
    str                 fileName;

    fileName = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex::Replace(_fileName, pattern, _char2use);
    fileName = strReplace(fileName , '\\', _char2use);
    return fileName;
}

I used this article.