Dealing with lists in .Net Business Connector and how to get around it
So I had the pleasure of having to deal with Lists and Containers in the .Net Business Connector and it was NOT a pleasurable experience. Axapta uses lists and containers and trying to use them in C# was a complete nightmare because using either type always generated a ‘Bad Container’ error.
The Axapta SDK states that a List is equivalent to a generic list in C#….this is incorrect Axapta doesn’t support generics. The real c# array to use is the ArrayList because it is not of generic type. When you go to pass the ArrayList into the method you must use the following code to do so: list.ToArray(typeof(string)). Otherwise you will get an invalid parameter exception but this still generated a ‘Bad Container’ exception.
The Axapta SDK states that you can use a AxaptaContainer to pass into a method where the container object is being used but unfortunately COM interop doesn’t translate it correctly and once again throws a ‘Bad Container’ exception.
The solution? I ended up using a comma separated string to pass into a new method and used the Axapta ‘strSplit’ Global method to split the string into an Axapta List.
Below is the x++ method that I created
server static void finishMultiMDSi(str _pickListIds)
{
List list = new List(Types::String);
;
if (_pickListIds)
{
// We pass in a comma sep string, we split the string into a list
list = strSplit(_pickListIds, ',');
// Pass the list into the finishMulti method to post the pick list
WMSPickingRoute::finishMulti(list.pack());
}
}