Hi trinadh sura, Pls bear with the presentation style, am in a good mood now..................
I am not sure if I was dreaming, but I was among tables in AOT of Axapta. I could see hundreds of tables with tons of data in them. Many of the fields in the table were labeled with different names, though the category of the contents in the column/fields of each were the same, just like among humans we are labeled as Christians, Muslims, Hindus etc. though we are all Man. While I had my journey through the silent Paths of Dynamics-AX -AOT, I could see several classes chunked with beautiful localization business logic. These classes are there to Work on the data available in the table columns. When I looked deep inside the classes I could see that, in some cases the classes are not using the real name of table column to access data, but something else. Say like the SocialSecurityNo(SSN). of US to identify the individual. I wondered and asked the class itself about this. She told me that the same business logic inside her can work upon many different table fields which hold similar data, had their name been THE SAME. But this is not possible in practice. So she achieves this using a mechanism called "Map" which helps her to work on multiple table fields (each with different name) since the individual table column name is not HardCoded inside the her. But she stores an alias (key) that will point to the individual table column (value) containing similar fields/data. Which table field should be contacted for retrieving data is dynamically resolved through the Mapping in the Map from X++ itself. If a Map maps to 5 different tables then we can say that the mapping fields can be roughly the intersection of all the fields of the five tables. The story goes..............I opened my eyes and pondered on what she told me. Regarding Maps & Table "methods" ---- Maps are used when u want to share table methods to avoid duplication of code in each table. In AX, tables have a similar mechanism just like the class- "Global" in the system doc, for sharing resources b/w objects. But for a table we expect that kind of "sharing" through the concept of "Normalization". A good table design means the tables follow the 3rd Normal form. But if you have tables that are going to contain same methods, due to the nasty reason that tables cannot be bought to 3rd Normal form for some good reason; this will result in code duplication. We should not encourage this in AX. So keep the methods that are going to duplicate, inside a mechanism called Map (there are 2 Maps in Ax, Table Map and The MAP class both are different). Relate the tables through the "mapping" section of the Table Map, put the methods which are to be shared under the “methods” node of the Map. NB: You have to use a map only when Normalization is out of question. Thanks & Regards Sailendran trinadh sura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: When we write methods in maps? __________________________________________________________ Ever tasted chocolate samosas? Try Sanjeev Kapoor's chocolate temptations http://www.msnspecials.in/photogallery/photogallery.asp?id=a2006117124625628 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
