Running Modern Point of Sale (MPOS) and Cloud Point of sale (CPOS) Samples

Today we are going to discuss on how to run and use Modern Point of Sale (MPOS) and Cloud Point of Sale (CPOS) samples provided in the Retail SDK by Microsoft as a development guide for Retail extension and customization development.

For Details on the Retail SDK please see my previous 

blog here.

Let’s navigate to Retail SDK -> POS and see what’s in there.

As we can see here the POS folder contains a visual studio solution that contains files that are built in order to make these sample run. Let’s run the any of the project MPOS and CPOS to see the contents.

Usually the development is done on the CPOS so let’s run the CPOS so that we can further proceed with running the sample extensions aswell.

Start the visual studio as an admin and open the CloudPos project.

NOTE: Make a backup of RetailSDK before making any changes to the SDK.

As we can see that the solutions contains two projects which are POS.Web and POS.Extensions. All the Extensions and customization we do will be done in the POS.Extension project and we donot need to look at the POS.Web project as no changes will be made to so we can collapse that project.

Now we can see that the POS.Extension project contains only three files…. We will look into the details of the files later but if we go into the extension folder of the POS folder we can see many folder which are not visible here

The highlighted files in the folder are not visible in the project so we need to make them visible in order to work with them. To make the files visible click on the show all files button highlighted in the image below and you will see all the files that were in the folder here.

Now we need to include the files that we need for development purpose in the project so we can work with them so include only the files we need to the project. Since we will be only working with some extensions for this blog let’s just include the SampleExtensions and SampleExtension2 folders to the project. The necessary files for development are the files except the folder with are optional to include so lets include the files.

Since the Retail Modern POS is a typescript based application so all the extensions developed for POS will be in typescript. Before moving on with the discussion over the files in the POS.Extension project let’s just have a look on the basic Cloud POS so that we can then identify the POS extension we applied to the POS.

This is the basic POS screen … Let’s Navigate to any product in the product categories.

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This is the basic POS product view screen as we can see that there are many panels displaying here and we can extend more here … lets now move on with the details of the POS files we previously included in the project so that we can run our sample extensions and check its impact.

The two most important file after the customizations files that we included in the form of folders are tscongif.json and extension.json.

Tsconfig.json:

If we look into this file we can see multiple sample extension listed. So what does this file do … basically the extension listed in this file are excluded from build and are not applied to the POS inorder to run sampleextension and sampleextension2 we need to  comment them out from this file.

Extension.json:

This file consists of the link to the base extensions folder which contains the extension. This specifies the POS to look for the specified extension in the place. Initially the file is empty and we need to specify which extension are place where.

To run these extensions just simply build the solution and login to POS.

Here you can see the highlighted product availability sample in action.

Introduction to Retail SDK

Working with Retail SDK

Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP contains many modules one of which is the Retail module for carrying out the retail operations of an enterprise. For development purposes Microsoft provides a Retail SDK that contains samples for developing retail extensions, customization's and applications.

The Retail SDK is placed in the J:/ dive of the cloud hosted virtual machine (VM) and in the C:/ drive of the locally hosted VM. Since I will be working on a locally hosted VM it will be my C:/ drive.

Retail SDK is pre installed in the default d365 VM provided by Microsoft (In order to get Retail SDK one can get it through LCS by installing binaries then moving the Retail SDK from binaries folder to the development VM simply by coping this will be further discussed in upcoming blogs).

Let’s navigate to the Retail SDK folder and check its content.

As we can see the SDK contains many folders, each containing multiple other folders and files used in the development of Retail extensions and customization's. Let’s discuss each folder one by one to understand in detail the purpose of each folder.

Retail SDK Contents:

Assets Folder:

          Contains files used for deployment and package generation purposes.

Build Tools:

            Contains MsBuild tool files for building a Retail deployable package which can be deployed through LCS.

Database:

          Contains Database Schema and scripts for Retail Channel Database. Also contains Retail channel database extension scripts and schema.

Documents:

          Contains files related to SDK development.

Online Store:

          Contains files for E commerce Store (online store) development and extension.

Packages:

          Contains folders generated for deployment purpose also contains the retail deployable package that is generated by the MsBuild tool.

POS:

          Contains the files and folders for Retail Modern POS and Cloud POS extensions development and customization's.

Proxies:

          Contains folders and files for retail proxy generation.

References:

            Contains DLLs which are used in the retail SDK development and required by Retail SDK extensions.

Sample Extensions:

            Contains Folders for multiple type of extensions and customization's that can be performed in the retail SDK.

So the folders not discussed here are Payment-externals, Payments and Tools which will be discussed in further blogs.

The folders we will be mostly using for development of extensions will be POS and Sample Extensions.

Check out how to run retail pos samples here.

AX Metadata Error -- Forbidden

AX Meta Data Error – Forbidden

Error: Exception occurred on the metadata service on client or server – error: forbidden.

While setting report data source as query the above error occurred.

Solution :

To Solve the above issue, follow the steps as mentioned.

Step 1:

 Check for the “OfflineAuthenticationAdminEmail”  key in file “DynamicsDevConfig” in AOSService -> PackagesLocalDirectory->Bin to be set to  the correct login email that you are using.

In my case it was set to someone@somewhere.com  which then was change to the correct user.

Step 2:

Restart IIS by running command prompt as administrator and typing the issreset command.

Step 3:

Restart Microsoft Sql Server Reporting Services through the Service manager i.e Services.msc.

Step 4:

Restart the  visual studios and sign in with the user email which was set in the DynamicsDevConfig in step 1.