Does Dynamics AX 2009 support item hierarchies?

Question

For example, a Blue Chair is manufactured by a manufacturer M. Therefore, there is a Blue Chair item.

Wholesaler X and Wholesaler Y both buy Blue Chairs from Manufacturer M. They put them in different boxes and give them different brand names. Now we have Wholesaler-Items A and B, both of which are a type of Blue Chair.

Our software allows customers to browse the catalogues of Wholesalers X and Y. We need to keep track of the hierarchy and relationship between these items.

Are there built-in tables etc in Dynamics AX 2009 for this?

PS: Although there are only 2 levels in this example, there can be more.

Answer 1

AX uses a relational database and hierarchies are easily represented in a relational database.

The coming release, AX 2012, will provide relations between organisations (DirParty table), see http://64.4.11.252/en-us/library/gg731820(AX.60).aspx

But it will most likely not provide relations between (arbitrary?) objects as you describe.

A possible general table structure for a "relation" table:

• RelationType
• RefTableId1
• RefRecId1
• RefTableId2
• RefRecId2

The RelationType could be an enum of fixed relations or an id of a record describing the relation.

Answer 2

There are several ways your example could be handled. The simplest would be to create an item BlueChair, then use the Vendor - Item description setup to note that X's item number for BlueChair is A and Y's is B.

You could also use the Configuration item dimension to create a specific configuration of BlueChair for each wholesaler. There are also item dimensions for Color and Size.

For more complicated scenarios, you could create the item as a BOM, and create different BOM versions for each wholesaler.