Mitch Milam's Dynamics CRM and xRM Discussions

One of the most fascinating things I found during the creation of the CRM Migration Assistant is the different methods developers use to access CRM form fields, and other form elements.

Normally, people access a form field using the following style of JavaScript:

crmForm.all.name

This is the normal and perfectly acceptable (and supported) method for referencing CRM form fields.

But, for various reasons, I've also seen fields reference using these crmForm methods:

crmForm.name
crmForm.elements["name"]
crmForm.all["name"]
crmForm["name"]

This is perfectly acceptable JavaScript and the CRM 4.0 object model had no objection to this practice, so all of these methods seemed to work.

In fact, accessing CRM form fields using the JavaScript document object using these methods worked as well:

document.all("name_c")
document.all["name"]
document.getElementById("name_c")

The real question is: Will these methods continue to work when the organization is upgraded to CRM 2011?

The answer is: If you have used standard and supported methods within your JavaScript, then yes, the code will be supported.

This means referencing all of your form fields using the standard access model:

crmForm.all.name

Other options may or may not work correctly. Your experience my vary depending on which of the above methods were used.

Fortunately, the CRM Migration Assistant converts all of these "unsupported" form field access types into fully-supported CRM 2011 code using Xrm.Page.getAttribute and Xrm.Page.getControl, depending on how the field was being used.

If you haven't already, download the trial version of the CRM Migration Assistant and convert some of your questionable JavaScript through the conversion process.

If you run into any conversion issues, send me a code sample so that I can update the conversion process.

As I was reviewing notes from the recently released CRM SDK 5.0.9, I noticed a section on Error Codes.  "This looks interesting," I thought.

After you have installed the CRM SDK, navigate to the following folder:

sdk\samplecode\cs\helpercode

In that folder you will find, among other things, three files related to error codes, each in a different format. It appears that there are around 2,015 error codes.  Wow, that's a lot of documentation!

crmerrors.xlsx

Is a Microsoft Excel worksheet formatted like this:

errorcodes.cs

Is a C# class that has the error codes inside of a class that you can incorporate into your applications. The code starts off like this:

private static Hashtable ErrorMessages = new Hashtable();

static ErrorCodes()
{
    ErrorMessages.Add(InvalidAuth,
        "Organization Authentication does not match the current discovery service Role.");
    ErrorMessages.Add(CannotUpdateOrgDBOrgSettingWhenOffline,
        "Organization Settings stored in Organization Database cannot be set when offline.");
    ErrorMessages.Add(InvalidOrgDBOrgSetting,
        "Invalid Organization Setting passed in. Please check the datatype and pass in an appropriate value.");
    ErrorMessages.Add(UnknownInvalidTransformationParameterGeneric,
        "One or more input transformation parameter values are invalid: {0}.");
    ErrorMessages.Add(InvalidTransformationParameterOutsideRangeGeneric,
        "One or more input transformation parameter values are outside the permissible range: {0}.");

crmerrors.xml

The final version of the file is an XML which is formatted like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<crmerrors xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <crmerror>
    <ErrorId>
      80048516
    </ErrorId>
    <ManagedErrorName>
      InvalidAuth
    </ManagedErrorName>
    <ErrorMessage>
      Organization Authentication does not match the current discovery service Role.
    </ErrorMessage>
  </crmerror>
  <crmerror>
    <ErrorId>
      80048515
    </ErrorId>
    <ManagedErrorName>
      CannotUpdateOrgDBOrgSettingWhenOffline
    </ManagedErrorName>
    <ErrorMessage>
      Organization Settings stored in Organization Database cannot be set when offline.
    </ErrorMessage>
  </crmerror>

Regardless of how you use it, these files are a great resource for any CRM developer.