Exporting/Importing specific tables via the TDTT (Test Data Transfer Tool) / Transfering only user tables with role assignments via TDTT

Recently after starting to use the Test Data Transfer Tool (TDTT) it was brought to my attention that users and role associations were not coming over. This is because by default this tool has a list of tables to not export. You can control which tables do and do not get exported/imported by modifying these lists. Currently you can find these lists within the install folder of the TDDT (dp.exe) If you choose the default install location it would be located at


C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Test Data Transfer Tool (Beta)\[Lists]

By default the tool will ignore any table names found within these txt files. However in our case we only want to export/import the specific user tables and nothing else. So first we need to look at how we can accomplish this.

To only include a specific table we can use the following code:

.*(?<!^Table1)

or if we only want to export 2 tables .*(?<!^Table1)(?<!^Table2)

This gives us the functionality to export/import specific tables. However now we need to figure out which tables we actually need to transfer in order to correctly transfer users + their role assignments.

We can start by looking at the default file "Exclude - User.txt" However this does not include the role assignments which you may also need. The role assignments are present at the table SECURITYUSERROLE. So combining the default list + the role table we get the following


.*(?<!^SYSBCPROXYUSERACCOUNT)(?<!^USERINFOSTARTUPMODEL)(?<!^SYSCOMPANYUSERINFO)(?<!^USERSIDCACHE)(?<!^(DEL_)?USERINFO)(?<!^(DEL_)?USERGROUPLIST)(?<!^(DEL_)?USERGROUPINFO)(?<!^SYSUSERPROFILES)(?<!^SYSUSERLOG)(?<!^SYSUSERINFO)(?<!^SYSUSER.*)(?<!^SECURITYUSERROLE)

Once we have the new file defined with the code above we need to remove all other lists from this folder so that it will only export/import the tables we have defined in our new file instead of exporting the entire db but excluding the tables defined by default. Whenever these files are removed and only 1 is left in the folder you issue the same command to export/import the entire db but this time it should only grab the tables defined in your new file.


Commands to export/import:

DP.exe export C:\AXExport src_db_name sql\AXInstance
DP.exe import C:\AXExport target_db_name sql\AXInstance






Per the TechNet article on the TDTT we can use the following regular expression syntax in our include/exclude lists

Regular expression syntax	Description
.	Match any single character.
*	Match the previous expression zero or more times.
(?<! subexpression)	Prevent a match if the end of the previously matched content matches the subexpression. This expression is known as a zero-width negative lookbehind assertion.
^	Match the start of the string.

You can view the rest of the filtering options for this tool @ Run the Test Data Transfer Tool (beta) for Microsoft Dynamics AX [AX 2012]