Schemas generated off the AX 2012 R3 services are not understood by the Visual Studio XSD editor.

Question

Hi, 

I generated the schemas for consuming the Vendors service in AX. The first issue is that the Wizard generated an empty binding file as I described here:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c6cfaf91-ab64-4c47-9e66-375156b29739/empty-binding-files-when-generating-ax-2012-r3-service-schemas?forum=biztalkr2adapters

The second issue is that the Visual Studio doesn't understand the schemas.  Here is the problem - the two nodes with the same names (but different types): 

Here is how these nodes are defined: 

This xsd is imported into the schema defining the actual messages that has to be send/received between BizTalk and AX, and the xsd editor and the mapper choke on them:

Does anyone have a solution for this?
Microsoft guys monitoring the forum, are you aware of these issues? Any info from the product group on fixing them?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It looks like circular reference.  You haven't shown enough of the schema to tell, AxdEntity_VendTable is cut off.

Answer 2

It does like like a CR, at least this is what XSD editor/Mapper think, but it is not. 

The VendTable screenshot shows how the schema has the same node names with different underlying types. At this point everything is good, Visual Studio is happy.

The final schema (that is what I have to work with in my BizTalk solution) shown in the second screenshot imports the Vendor Schema and that's where XSD Editor and Mapper choke seeing this a a circular reference. So my only option is xpath/xslt and turning validation off. 

I would not bother people if it was the first and only occurrence. In fact this is the third time already we have exact same problem with AX, just with different entity. I still hope there is some trick, perhaps on the  AX side preventing this from happening. 

Thanks a lot!

Answer 3

Have you tried to pinpoint the exact problem?

What if you rename the parent VendTable in the ref schema?

Answer 4

De-Serialization/Validation will fail on the AX side - we of course tried this and that with the schema. 

Thank you for trying to help, Johns305. I just want Microsoft to notice the problem. BizTalk-AX is a very common pair, and the situation where integration with Microsoft's own product is a bigger headache than with for example SAP, should be addressed.

Answer 5

Hi,

Ask your AX developer to update the AX AIF service to make sure the AX AIF query uses unique record names. 

Easy fix in AX.

Best regards

Rasmus Jaeger

Answer 6

There are other non-BizTalk consumers using this service, so I am afraid this is not an option. I will talk to AX support anyway, thank you for the suggestion.