We were asked to troubleshoot an interesting issue. The client was generating the sales order confirmation documents, leveraging the standard AIF SalesOrder service. The generated XML document contained incongruent data. The Header section, driven by the SalesTable data, contained information from an entirely different sales order, than the one being confirmed. The Lines section, on the other hand, was absolutely correct – information coming from the correct sales order.
The simplified XML looked as follows. Note the SalesId in the Header section (A) is not the same as the SalesId in the Lines section (B). The actual sales order being confirmed was B– the SalesId in the Lines section.
I’m sure you would agree that this picture is bizarre, to say the least. The AIFCorrelation also ended up being skewed. While the document history indicated that the document belonged to the correct SalesId B, the actual correlation was pointing to the incorrect SalesId A.
What this turned out to be was an incorrect customization added to the axSalesTable class. The developer added a new field to the document, by extending the class with a new parm method. Unfortunately, he had made the mistake of creating an inner join between the table from which he wanted to pull the value and the salesTable, and did so using the axSalesTable’s global table buffer variable salesTable – the buffer that drives all of the information in the Header section of the document, when the object is serialized into XML! The inner join resulted in a selection of an entirely different salesTable record and reset the salesTable buffer!
Mystery solved J
