Ever since the migration to Visual Studio as the primary IDE for AX, one of the complaints from developers has been how cumbersome it has become using the cross references, as it was using the default cross references viewer from Visual Studio.
Engineers looked for ways to make life at least a bit easier by building all sorts of weird extensions and tools. One such tool I have shared in 2016 in the following post: Development tool: Copy 'Find references' results to clipboard (to Excel) in Visual Studio for AX 7.
Well, in the 10.0.47 / PU71 release of Dynamics 365 ERP we finally see some improvements to the Cross References tool.
Here's how it looks now:
The benefits are:
- You can now exclude test models, which is great as that used to get in the way a lot when looking for code
- You can now group the references by model and/or type.
In the image above you can see I've chosen to show the cross references for WHSWorkTable, excluding test models and grouping by the element type. This helped narrow down my search significantly, where I was looking for forms, where work table is one of the data sources.
Some things that are still missing, and will hopefully be added in a future update:
- Ability to further search over the results
- Matching the theme to the VS / Windows theme, by supporting Dark mode
- (very unlikely) Read/Write designation like in old AX versions
Are there any other Cross References features you would like to see?
Let me know in the comments, and I'll make sure the owning team is made of aware of the request.
