Get weather forecast details in Dynamics Ax 2012

Overview:-

In today’s competitive business world, there are many factors which determine the profit or loss. A climatic condition has its own impact and is becoming increasingly important for the corporates. Like Demand forecast, weather forecast can be very helpful in business planning.

This Job is an attempt to predict the weather conditions in advance and organize things in such a way which will help the companies not only to optimize their resources but also maximize their profits.

In the example, I used Yahoo released rss weather feeds: http://weather.yahoo.com/rss and XML programming to get the climatic conditions The format of the URL for the feed is:

http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=USNY0996&u=f

p is a US zip or a Yahoo! Weather location ID
u is the temp. units. 'F' for Fahrenheit (default) and 'C' for celcius

staticvoidweatherForecast(Args _args)
{   
XmlDocument         doc = newXmlDocument();   
XmlNamespaceManager ns;   
XmlNodeList         nodes,nodes1;   
XmlNode                node,node1;  
//AddressZipCodeaddresszipCode;   
container day(str _day)
{
;       
switch(_day)
    {           
case'Mon' : return [1,'Monday'];           
case'Tue' : return [2,'Tuesday'];           
case'Wed' : return [3,'Wednesday'];           
case'Thu' : return [4,'Thursday'];           
case'Fri' : return [5,'Friday'];           
case'Sat' : return [6,'Saturday'];           
case'Sun' : return [7,'Sunday'];            
Default :returnconnull();
    }
}
;
//addresszipCode = _args.record();   
doc.Load("http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=INXX0001&u=c" );
// Setup namespace manager for XPath
ns = newXmlNamespaceManager(doc.nameTable());   
ns.AddNamespace("yweather", "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0");
nodes1 = doc.SelectNodes("//rss/channel/item/yweather:condition", ns);
node1= nodes1.nextNode(); 
setprefix("Weather forecast");    
    info(strFmt("%1,Temp : %2,%3",node1.attributes().getNamedItem("date").InnerText(),node1.attributes().getNamedItem("temp").InnerText(),node1.attributes().getNamedItem("text").InnerText()));
// Getforecast with XPath
nodes = doc.SelectNodes("//rss/channel/item/yweather:forecast", ns);
node = nodes.nextNode();   
//setprefix("Weather forecast");
while(node)
    {       
info("—————————————————–");       
        info(strFmt("%1-(%2)",conpeek(day(node.attributes().getNamedItem("day").InnerText()),2),node.attributes().getNamedItem("date").InnerText()));
info("—————————————————–");       
info(node.attributes().getNamedItem("text").InnerText());       
info('Min :'+node.attributes().getNamedItem("low").InnerText());       
info('Max :'    +node.attributes().getNamedItem("high").InnerText());       
if(dayofwk(today()) ==conpeek(day(node.attributes().getNamedItem("day").InnerText()),1))
        {           
info('Current :' +node.attributes().getNamedItem("code").InnerText());
        }       
else
        {            
info('Current : NA');
        }       
node = nodes.nextNode();
    }
}

Note: 

 1) An essential pre-requisite for the code to work is the URL should not be blocked by the firewall. 

 2)We can directly use this job as an menuitemaction button by adding the job in menuitems under actions, Then add the button in the AddressZipcode form , for that make use of the commented code of AddressZipcode in the above Job. 

Here are some example location IDs (do not include the city name) or use the existing Zipcodes of Ax.

Beijing: CHXX0008
Helsinki: FIXX0002
London: UKXX0085
Moscow: RSXX0063
Munich: GMXX0087
Paris: FRXX0076
Riyadh: SAXX0017
Tokyo: JAXX0085

For more details on the Yahoo! Weather RSS feed and other location IDs, please visit http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/index.html.