Batch-renaming a primary key.

For a programmer who has experienced the "terror" of having to batch-rename primary keys in Dynamics AX's predecessor XAL/C5, I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it is in Dynamics AX 2009.

Though not documented a method called renamePrimayKey exists on the kernel class xRecord which each table apparently inherits from.

If you call this method after changing the primarykey field on a tablebuffer, this change will be cascaded to related tables. :0)

I was given a task to perform renaming of Items in the InventTable.
In an environment that is to go live - so THERE WERE NO TRANSACTIONS OG STOCK LEVELS. If this has been the case we would have adviced the customer to live with it, as the renaming process potentially would have taken a very long time

Nearly 75% of the item numbers were named with 4 digits, the rest with 5.
The customer wanted only 5-digit item numbers.

How to do this in one go ?
A simple job is enough:


static void Job7(Args _args)
{

InventTable inventTable;
;

ttsbegin;
while select forupdate inventTable
where inventTable.ItemId LIKE "????"
{
inventTable.ItemId = "0"+InventTable.ItemId;
inventTable.renamePrimaryKey();
}
ttscommit;
}