Activate financial dimensions without downtime

Today I want to share a small trick I learned this week from a colleague of mine. I wasn’t aware of this possibility and couldn’t find any documentation on this. So it is more of a reminder post for myself, and maybe I am not the last person to learn about this.

When we want to activate financial dimensions in D365 F&O we need to put the system in the maintenance mode. In a Tier2+ environment this can be a lengthy process as enabling and disabling the maintenance mode through the LCS takes some time.
With the help of a entity we can speed this up, as the process doesn’t require the environment to be in the maintenance mode.

So we need to activate a financial dimension like in the picture.

All we need to do is to to create a data export project to export the Dimension attribute activation entity (DimensionAttributeActivationEntity).
As a result we only get one record, it’s possible that you need to set the values to yes.

Next step is to create a data import project with the same entity.

Start the import and wait until it is complete. Now we can head over to the financial dimensions and there we can see that the dimension is activated.

Lets take a look behind the actual code of the entity. The upsertRecord() method gets called in case of an insert or update for the entity.

Depending on the values set in the imported excel file the activation and copy process gets triggered. And the dimensions are activated without the need for a maintenance window.

So far I only used this in a non production environment, but I assume this should be safe to be executed in prod also. Nonetheless I would suggest this is best performed when the environment isn’t heavily used.

Original Post https://d365fostuff.wordpress.com/2022/03/02/activate-financial-dimensions-without-downtime/