Dynamics AX has different menu items, which can sometimes be overwhelming when doing your daily activities. Regardless of your industry, you will rarely use all the menu items on a daily basis.
To improve your efficiency, you can build a custom menu on Dynamics AX with all the items that you regularly use. You may also want a custom menu to easily access the items you need for a business flow, rather than having to go to different pages to get them.
The easiest way to create a custom menu in Dynamics AX is using Favorites to access the commonly used menu items. However, the Favorites collection has its limitations. If you truly want a custom menu that will be your go-to resource, you have to create one.
When you create a custom menu, you can re-arrange the business processes to make them follow your organization's business process flow. The only time the menu will not be helpful is when you would like to find an item that you don’t normally use.
Below is an overview of how you can create a new Master menu containing just the items you need for your daily activities.
Creating a Master Menu
Follow these steps:
1. Get into the development environment by pressing CTRL + D.
2. When in the AOT area, expand the Menu group to see all the menu area pages. The next step is to select the Menus folder and right-mouse-click on it to reveal a side-display menu list. From the list, select the New Menu item to create a new menu for the Master menu. A new menu link will be created.
3. Select the newly created menu link and within the Properties panel on the right, click on Name and Label and change their values to Master.
4. The next step is to create groups for your business processes. Right-mouse-click the Master menu and from the side-display menu list, click the New menu item and select the Submenu option from the revealed menu list. A new folder will be created under the Master menu.
5. Change the Name and Label properties of the newly created folder to Financials.
6. Follow the same steps to create group folders for other business processes you commonly use, i.e. Operations, Procure To Pay, Order to Cash, and Hire to Retire. For each business group folder, click the New menu item, select the Submenu option from the revealed menu list and change the Name and Label properties as appropriate.
7. After finishing, right-mouse-click the Master menu and click the Open New Window menu item. Tile the windows so that you can see both the menu and the AOT tree. Navigate to the menu items you want included in the Master menu and drag them over to the business processes that they belong in.
8. Repeat the process for all the menu items until the Master menu has all the main business forms added to it.
Note: When dragging the menu items, make sure you are pressing the CTRL key so that you make a copy of the items rather than just moving them.
9. The next step is to add an icon to the Master menu so that it looks like the other menus in Dynamics AX. To do this, simply click the Master menu and on the Properties tab, change the Image Location value to EmbeddedResource.
10. Next, click the … at the right of the Normal Image property and search for a menu icon that looks good through the resource file.
11. Finally, click Save to update the menu.
12. The next step is adding the Master menu you’ve created to the main menu where you will easily access it. To do this, click the Menus group and expand the MainMenu menu item. Then, right-mouse-click on the MainMenu folder, select the New menu item and click the Menu Reference menu item. A new Select Menu list will be opened.
13. Drag the Master menu list from the list of menu items into the MainMenu item.
14. Save the changes and restart Dynamics AX to refresh the menus.
Congratulations! You have created a custom menu in Dynamics AX.
