AX 2012 Alternate item for unavailable stock

In Dynamics AX 2012, you can have the user automatically prompted for an alternate item in the even that an entered sales line item is out of stock/unavailable via the 'Alternative product' fields in the Sell tab of the 'released product details' form.

If the alternate item selected for an entered item also has an alternate item where conditions are met based on that item's 'When to use' field, that item will feed into the alternate item functionality. Basically, the system could potentially keep looking for alternate items as long as conditions are continually met and the items all have alternate item numbers in them.

There are several options to choose when picking the alternate item via the 'When to use' field:

1. Never - the alternate item is never used (feature turned off for the item)
2. Nothing in inventory - the user is prompted with Figure 2 if there is no stock on hand for that item in that warehouse
3. Always - the user is always prompted for the replacement item (Figure2)

While AX has other concepts like Related products, supplementary items (sales/purch), and linked products (retail), there is no functionality to leverage these into alternate item functionality.


Figure 1- The alternative product functionality in the released products form


Figure 2 - The pop up box that is shown to the user for alternate items