Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management Cookbook - Second Edition
by Simon Buxton
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Surrogate keys have some history, which is important to understand. These were introduced in AX 2012 as a performance aid and allowed features like the ledger account lookup when entering general ledger journals. The problem is that they are hardwired to be RecId. So, when we added foreign key relations, the field created contained an unhelpful 64-bit integer. To solve this, an alternate key was added, which is a property on the index definition. This allows a more meaningful relation to be used for a foreign key. The primary key could only be unique indexes that have the Alternate Key property set.
The other type of key introduced was the replacement key. The replacement key is a way to show a meaningful key, other than the ...
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