Just a quick tip when you want to do some simple logging when jobs are running. Suppose you need to modify a lot of data and you want to log which records are updated and some other things. You could send it to the infolog window but its (default) limit of 10,000 lines may not be enough and you lose information. It also means you get the information after the job has finished.
For a data correction job I had to update some 20,000 records and couldn’t rely on the infolog for output. I decided to write the information to a file. The fun part is you can use Powershell to view content in real time as it’s being added to the file.
So I made the job with logging to a file, say c:\temp\logfile.csv. While the job was running, and Ax is blocked, I opened a Powershell prompt and issued this command:
get-content -path 'C:\temp\logfile.csv' -wait |
It’s the -Wait parameter that makes it work like tail -f on a Unix system. I think this is a very simple and good enough solution for one-off jobs. Because we can do everything in Ax we can make it harder than it should be for things like this. Sometimes it’s easier to step outside the Ax box and use existing tools with little effort.