Help system architecture

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Applies To: Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Feature Pack, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of the Microsoft Dynamics AX Help system.

Help system topology (excluding Internet)

To better understand how the components in this diagram work together, consider the following example.

  1. An employee clicks the Help menu or presses F1 when viewing a form in Microsoft Dynamics AX.

  2. The Microsoft Dynamics AX client determines which Help topic should be displayed. It requests that specific topic from the Help server.

  3. The Help server locates the topic and determines if there are any labels to define for that topic. If so, the Help server requests the definitions of the labels from the Microsoft Dynamics AX Application Object Server (AOS).

    For example, suppose a help topic contains the label @SYS11904. The Help server will request the definition of this label from the AOS. After the AOS returns the definition, Customer group, the Help server replaces all instances of @SYS11904 with Customer group.

  4. The Help server sends the topic to the client, where it is displayed in the Help viewer.