Dataimport/-export Framework DMF / DIXF - broken target entity

The Dataimport/-export Framework is a great tool to get a lot of data into AX. But like most of the nice tools the Feedback is sometimes not as detailed as it could be.

While working on some imports with standard entities I was unable to move data from staging to target.

The infolog showed the well known message that 0 records had been inserted into target. So I started some research. Best hint was the message from the Validation of the target entity which was:

Target XML tags are not generated and hierarchy cannot be found

Die Ziel-XML-Markierungen wurden nicht generiert, und die Hierarchie kann nicht gefunden werden.

So I checked the structure of the entity which was empty. I still don't know how this could happen, but there is an easy way to recreate this structure. The following lines of code will help:

DMFEntity   dmfEntity;

select dmfEntity where dmfEntity.EntityName == "BrokenEntityName";

if (dmfEntity.EntityType == DMFEntityTypes::Entity)
{
    DMFTargetXML::buildQueryDS(dmfEntity);
    DMFTargetXMLToEntityMap::generateMapping(dmfEntity);
}