Basic Address Book structure in Ax2012

This is a quick overview of the main tables involved in the address book functionality of Ax2012.

In Ax2009, the integration between the address book and 'entities', like customers, suppliers, etc was a bit flaky. This has been tightened up in Ax2012 so that now the address book has a much more important role in maintaining basic data like customer names and addresses etc.

A few of the tables you'll need to know about are:

Table	Description
DirPartyTable	Global address book. This will contain entries for all people and organizations you deal with, including customers, suppliers, employees, etc. This information is maintained across the entire organization. NB the table structure often refers to address book entries as 'parties'. Generally other records (like customer, supplier, etc) will reference a record in this table by a field named Party.
LogisticsLocation	This is a single 'location' that can be attached to one or more address book entries. This is similar in principle to the old 'Address' table from Ax2009, that no longer exists - The main difference now being that the location header always points to an address book entry, whereas in 2009 the Address table could point to anything. Note that this is not an address - Physical address details are stored in LogisticsPostalAddress
LogisticsPostalAddress	A postal address, linked to a LogisticsLocation record via field Location.
LogisticsElectronicAddress	'Electronic' address details, such as email, phone, web address etc. Each different type of address is represented as a separate record, delineated by 'Type'. This links to the location record.
DirPartyLocation	This table links entries in the LogisticsLocation table to an address book entry (DirPartyTable).
LogisticsLocationRole	This defines types of roles that an address are classified as, such as "Delivery", "Invoice", etc.
DirPartyLocationRole	Links a location role type (LogisticsLocationRole) and an address book entry (DirPartyTable)
DirPartyPostalAddressView (view)	This is a view that collates address book entries with their linked postal addresses

A few of the address book tables you should know about

The following code sample shows how we could obtain the postal addresses for a customer. NB You would preferably use a view or joined queries to get this information. I've expanded it out to demonstrate the relationships.

static void ShowCustomerAddressBookDetails(Args _args)
{
    CustTable               custTable;
    DirPartyTable           dirPartyTable;
    DirPartyLocation        partyLocation;
    LogisticsLocation       logisticsLocation;
    LogisticsPostalAddress  postalAddress;
    ;
    custTable       = custTable::find('2014');
    dirPartyTable   = dirPartyTable::findRec(custTable.Party);
    while select partyLocation
        where   partyLocation.Party     == dirPartyTable.RecId
    {
        logisticsLocation = logisticsLocation::find(partyLocation.Location);        
        if(logisticsLocation.IsPostalAddress)
        {
            postalAddress = LogisticsPostalAddress::findByLocation(logisticsLocation.RecId);            
            info(strFmt("%1 - %2",
                logisticsLocation.Description,
                postalAddress.CountryRegionId));
        }        
    }
}

Obtaining postal addresses from a customer

And to get the email addresses:

static void ShowCustomerEmailAddresses(Args _args)
{
    CustTable                   custTable;
    DirPartyTable               dirPartyTable;
    DirPartyLocation            partyLocation;
    LogisticsLocation           logisticsLocation;
    LogisticsElectronicAddress  electronicAddress;
    ;
    custTable       = custTable::find('2014');
    dirPartyTable   = dirPartyTable::findRec(custTable.Party);
    while select partyLocation
        where   partyLocation.Party     == dirPartyTable.RecId
    {
        logisticsLocation = logisticsLocation::find(partyLocation.Location);        
        while select electronicAddress
            where   electronicAddress.Location  == logisticsLocation.RecId
            &&      electronicAddress.Type      == LogisticsElectronicAddressMethodType::Email
        {            
            info(strFmt("%1",electronicAddress.Locator));
        }        
    }
}