Background:
Microsoft Dynamics AX offers you the ability to customize your application. Often times, customizations are built and tested in development, test and pre-production environments. Customers often need to have a production dataset to use when building and validating customizations in non-production environments.
The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Test Data Transfer Tool (beta) is a tool that helps move data between from production to non-production environments.
Important: The tool imports data table by table and truncates the data in the table before importing. Hence it is not supported and highly advised against running the tool for import in production environments.
The tool:
The Test Data Transfer Tool provides the ability to bulk move application data to a non-production environment. The tool uses SQLServer bulk copy (bcp).
Benefits:
- Export and import data outside AX, without running an AOS instance.
- Export and import processing are faster compared to other tools because this tool is based on SQL Server bcp.
- The tool can work around the table/field metadata changes between builds and environments and hence can be used to move data from build to build, and environment to environment even when there are customizations, and metadata changes.
- The tool minimally changes data during the import process. The only data the tool changes are the entity IDs (IDs related to table, field, etc.) that are stored as data and that could change with each deployment. The tool recognizes the changes and patches the data with the AXIDs of the system that the data is being imported into.
- The data file format is the standard format produced by SQL Server bcp. The output is text based and can be stored and compared against other versions in a version control system.
The documentation in the links below have detailed sections on how to install and run the tool, but I want to reiterate a few things to remember:
- Ensure that AOS is stopped prior to import and started after the import.
- This ensures any caches holding the values which are no more valid with the import are flushed.
- The tool doesn’t create /renumber recids, which means any references to these recIds stay intact.Given this, the tool works well when the data is moved in its entirety.
Official documentation for the tool: