Reference data sources is a powerful feature in AX 2012. A reference data source enables you to add the replacement fields for a surrogate foreign key replacement to a form design. It is used extensively on standard AX forms.
It becomes more interesting, when we reference date effective tables . In such scenarios we need to perform some steps to make sure that the date effective tables are queried correctly.
We can find a good example on sales table form. Let us have a look:
1. The date effective data sources are added under the sales table datasoure node as reference data sources.
2. The below piece of code on form init() method to check the validity:
If you doing some development task and plan to add date effective tables as reference data source, then make sure to model it the same way. Not doing so will cause an issue that the expired records will display a \”Unknown\” value in the reference data source record. A similar problem has been reported on Microsoft dynamics AX community forum. Detail can be found at this link. The below image reference is taken from the link:
Whitepaper to use date effective framework can be downloaded from here, however this information is not mentioned there.
Thanks for reading the blog.
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Brewing thought 
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