Adding labels to PieChart made with WPF Toolkit Charting Controls

WPF Toolkit Charting Controls is a dated assembly that allows to create line, bar, area, pie and column charts (it is possible to find an exhaustive and very tutorial on CodeProject about how to use it). It is a really ready to use tool, but sometimes it lacks some useful features.

In my case the pie chart does not allow to show labels with percentage on each pie area. It is a real pity.

Since each pie area is rendered by using a Geometry, my idea is to add something (i.e. another Geometry) to the one already computed. Areas are a handled by the PieDataPoint class. So we can get the Geometry computed by PieDataPoint, then add a new Geometry with the relative parcentage value and the use this new composition for drawing the area in the chart.

Appending pages to SSRS Pdf print management reports

More than once, it happened to me that a customer wanted to insert at the end of some PDF reports of the print management (invoices, confirmations, etc.) one or more pages containing different terms and conditions.

The first solution that can come to mind is to add these conditions directly to the report layout and repeat them for each requested report. However it is not uncommon that this list of clauses is the same for all reports and at the same time is very long. In cases like this it would not be a bad idea to have a single and already formatted text.

The ideal would be to have a pdf that contains the clauses to be able to hang directly to a report. Doing such a thing is not extremely complicated in D365fo. Let’s see how it can be done.

Change the connection string

In a development environment can be really useful to change AX connection string. For example it can allow to have a dev and a test database installed, without the need to continuosly backuping and restoring databases.

Natural key not found error during data entities creation

While creating Data Entites in Dynamics 365 for Operations (AX 7) it may happen to obtain an error: “The natural key for the table xyz was not found”. This error just tells that the table (related to the data entity) is missing a human readable key (that of course can’t be its RecId).

Deploying multiple SSRS Reports

Sometimes it can be useful to deploy multiple SSRS reports without the need to insert them into a single project or solution (for example after you install a new package).

Show list button bug

Recently I found a bug related to the show list button for forms with “Simple List and Detail” pattern. Indeed if the detail’s TabControl contains just one TabPage, the show list button strangely disappears.

A delayed EventTrigger for Caliburn Micro

EventTriggers in Calibur Micro are reposible for executing actions. Sometimes (think of a search box that calls the server, you’d want it to execute only if the user paused for a split second and not for every key stroke) can be useful having an EventTrigger which executes an action after a while.

Create and release a Product

In AX 2012 it was possible to create Product and Product Master through coding by use of some classes like EcoResProductServices or EcoResEcoResProduct (more info here).

With Dynamics 365 for operation those classes do not exist anymore, but it is possible to obtain the same result by using the product data entity (i.e. EcoResProductEntity) and some standard – long named – classes.