XPO Deployment in Dynamics AX

In Dynamics AX, One of the key methods of deploying new development to the AX environment is XPO Deployment. When modification is moving to the AX environment, we have to make sure to do comparing object process.

Comparing objects can be done either when importing a XPO file or by right-clicking on an object that exists in more than one layer and choosing “Compare” from the Add-Ins menu.

When importing a XPO file,

• Browse the XPO file & Open it. You can see tree view of all objects which contain in the XPO file.
• Right click on object which you want to compare and select “Compare”.

Figure 1

• When you select to compare XPO, the system will display a compare window (Figure 2). When clicking the lookup button for choosing the layer to compare. You might notice that the same layers are listed twice, with one set marked as old layer. The old layer is from the layer files stored in the application’s old folder.

Figure 2

• The compare window is divided into two panes. In the left side you have the tree view for the object. The right side shows the comparison results for the node selected in the left pane. The comparison results have the colors red and blue. The colors are used in the result to show the differences between the selected layers & XPO. Only nodes where there are differences are shown in the tree. The differences in layer & XPO are identified by color. In the tree a blue or a red checkbox indicates that the node only exist in the layer represented by that color. A two-colored icon indicates that the node is modified in both layer & XPO.

• In the compare window, lines of code which only exist in one layer are colored with the color representing that layer. A left or right arrow is displayed in the end of a colored line or a colored block of code. By clicking the arrows you can add or remove code to or from the current layer.