Walkthrough: After setting up a work-related Mobile Device menu item the user is constantly logged off when trying to use it on the device

Hey guys

As some of you might know, I was part of the team that released the new Warehouse and Transportation solution as part of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3.

As with any first version of the product (and this is a huge solution), there are certain issues that we simply did not have time to address. Some of them are however pretty hard to figure out the root cause for, unless you spend time debugging or know where to look to start with.

When setting up Mobile Device menu items to use at the warehouse, you have a couple of possibilities for what type of menu item it is going to be. Specifically, it can be a non-work related activity, a work-related activity, which results in creation of new work, or processing of existing work.

I won't go into the full description of how to set this up - you can easily find this information on technet, MSDN, etc.

Here's the short version of the flow, and the problem you might experience.

1. Navigate to Warehouse management > Setup > Mobile Devices > Mobile device menu items
2. Create a new menu item, and fill in the fields. Select Mode = Work, Use Existing Work = false.
3. Select Work creation process = Load item receiving
4. Save the record. It should look like below
5. Add the created menu item to one of the available mobile device menus.
6. Log in to the mobile device with any available work user and navigate to the menu item created above.

The created Mobile device menu item

Possible result of executing the above steps:

Sometimes, without any explanation, the user is consistently logged out of the mobile device, when trying to use the newly created menu item.

Root cause:

The problem can be that when creating the menu item, you accidentally selected an Activity code, changing its value from None to the next value on the list, which is Log off. This can happen quite easily, especially if you normally use the keyboard and not the mouse to click around. 

Now, even though you later changed the Mode to Work, the system still remembers the selection in the Activity code, and will apply it when using the menu item, resulting in a log off.

That's quite annoying, but also very easy to fix, just flip Mode to Indirect, revert the Activity code value back to None, and flip the Mode back to Work. All your settings for work creation setup should stay intact. 

To finish off, I just want to encourage all of you to install Dynamics AX R3 and try out the new modules, and send us feedback through Connect, Yammer, or comments on the SCM blog or here.

Thanks