Basic Business Intelligence artifacts in AX 7

AX 7 has changed the way analytics components are designed, deployed and used in this software. But the key principal for aggregating the data and slicing it by dimension remains the same. The perspectives and aggregate data entity are now first class member of AOT. Aggregate data entities can now be used as a data source in the form directly which was not possible in case of cubes earlier. This post describes the concepts of dimensions, measures and data entities.

Perspectives

As the name suggest, it is a different way to represent the transactional data. Generally data is arranged in such a way that it helps in making business decisions. For example, sales transactional data will have records about individual sales while business decision maker will like to have aggregate sales per region.

There are two main type – Dimensions and Measures.

Aggregate measures

Measures are the numeric fields which contains aggregate data of transactions. It may be count of records, average of some number or sum of a number. E.g. Aggregate sales.

Aggregate dimensions

Dimensions are data fields which can be used to divide the measured data (aggregate measure) E.g. regions of sale. So total sales can be divided in sales per region of sale.

In Dynamics AX, aggregate dimensions can be defined separately to a measure. But every dimension will not apply to all the measures. In a measure, developer need to define what dimensions are applicable to it.

Aggregate data entity (ADE)

ADE is a formal data model which uses aggregate measure(s) as its data source(s) and it have fields much like a normal table view. These fields can be chosen from the related measure’s fields and its related dimensions. ADE can be directly used as data source in forms or queries or code.

I’ll write another post for 'walk-through' creating the above artifacts in AX 7. Stay-tuned.