Microsoft Dynamic AX 2009 : Enterprise Portal - Inside Enterprise Portal, Page Processing

1. Introduction

Enterprise Portal is the Web platform for Dynamics AX 2009. Using the Enterprise Portal framework, developers can create new Web applications for Dynamics AX or customize existing ones. Enterprise Portal enables customers, vendors, business partners, and employees to directly access relevant business information and collaborate and conduct business transactions from anywhere through an easy-to-use Web user interface.

Enterprise Portal enables organizations to extend and expand the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and reach out to customers, vendors, business partners, and employees and access business applications from anywhere. By allowing them to interact directly with the business system, Enterprise Portal improves customer satisfaction, reduces support and help desk calls, empowers employees to collaborate effectively and make informed decisions, and improves overall efficiency.

Users access Enterprise Portal through a Web browser remotely or from within a corporate intranet, depending on how Enterprise Portal is configured and deployed. Enterprise Portal contains a set of default Web pages and user roles that you can use as-is or modify to meet your customer’s unique business needs. Enterprise Portal serves as the central place for users to access any data, structured or unstructured, such as transactional data, reports, charts, key performance indicators (KPIs), documents, and alerts. They can access and collaborate on this data from anywhere. Figure 1 shows the home page of an Enterprise Portal site.

Figure 1. Example of an Enterprise Portal home page

2. Inside Enterprise Portal

Built on ASP.NET and Windows SharePoint Services products and technologies, Enterprise Portal combines all the rich content and collaboration functionality in Windows SharePoint Services with the structured business data in Dynamics AX. It also brings the power and flexibility of ASP.NET and Visual Studio to help you build responsive, modern Web applications. This section introduces the underlying technology components that make up Enterprise Portal. In the subsequent sections, we discuss each component in detail.

With the rich Dynamics AX programming model, Enterprise Portal defines data access and business logic in MorphX, similar to the desktop client. It exposes data and business logic through data binding, data and metadata APIs, and proxy classes to ASP.NET, and it uses ASP.NET to define the user interface. Enterprise Portal uses the Web Part page framework from Windows SharePoint Services to build Web pages that allow easy customization and personalization. Enterprise Portal also brings the best of Dynamics AX, ASP.NET, and Windows SharePoint Services together and unifies them in the Application Object Tree (AOT) for easy deployment.

Developers define the business logic and data access in MorphX and use Visual Studio to build Web User Controls and define the Web user interface elements. Within the Web User Control, they can use Enterprise Portal controls or any ASP.NET control and use data binding and the standard ASP.NET programming model to define the user interface logic, seamlessly leveraging the business logic defined in MorphX and accessing Dynamics AX metadata and business data.

Developers use Windows SharePoint Services to define Web pages. Enterprise Portal Web pages use Enterprise Portal Web parts and other Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Web parts. The Enterprise Portal Web parts present information and expose functionality from Dynamics AX and are implemented with Windows SharePoint Services Web part technology. One such Web part is the Dynamics User Control Web part, which can host any ASP.NET Web User Control and connect to Dynamics AX through the Enterprise Portal framework and the .NET Business Connector. Windows SharePoint Services Web parts fulfill content and collaboration needs. Figure 2 shows the high-level components of Enterprise Portal.

Figure 2. Enterprise Portal components

3. Page Processing

The first step in developing or customizing an application on Enterprise Portal is to understand the interactions between the user’s browser on the client and Enterprise Portal on the server when the user accesses Enterprise Portal. The following sequence of interactions occurs when a user accesses Enterprise Portal:

1.	The user opens the browser on his or her machine and navigates to Enterprise Portal.
2.	The browser establishes a connection with the Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server.
3.	Based on the authentication mode enabled, IIS authenticates the user.
4.	After the user is authenticated, the Windows SharePoint Services Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) filter intercepts the page request and checks the user’s right to access the site.
5.	After the user is authorized by Windows SharePoint Services, the Web page routes to a custom Microsoft ASP.NET page handler object of Windows SharePoint Services. Figure 3 shows a simplified version of the page request process. Figure 3. Page request flow in Enterprise Portal
6.	The page handler pulls the Web part page data from the Windows SharePoint Services content database. This data contains information such as the page template ID, the Web parts used and their properties, and the page template stored on the file system on the Web server. Windows SharePoint Services then processes the page and creates and initializes the Web parts on the page with any properties and personalization data.
7.	When initialing Enterprise Portal Web parts, Enterprise Portal initializes a Web session with the Enterprise Portal Web framework through the .NET Business Connector to the Application Object Server (AOS).
8.	The Web framework checks for Dynamics AX authorization and then calls the appropriate Web handlers in the Web framework to process the Enterprise Portal objects that the Web part points to.
9.	The Dynamics User Control Web part runs the Web User Control that it’s pointing to. The Web User Control connects to Dynamics AX through .NET Business Connector and renders the HTML to the Web part.
10.	The Web page assembles all the HTML returned by all the Web parts and renders the page to the user’s browser.
11.	The Enterprise Portal Web session ends.

As you can see in this sequence, the AOS processes all the business logic and data retrieval, ASP.NET processes the user interface elements, and Windows SharePoint Services handles the overall page layout and personalization.