Mitch Milam's Dynamics CRM and xRM Discussions

As you have probably seen, CRM has the ability to roll-up information from child Entities to the parent Entity.  Activities would be one such example: When you look at the Activities for an Account, you actually see Activities for both the main Account as well as all Activities for the Account's Contacts as well.  A pretty great feature, if you ask me.

Anyway, the CRM SDK also has Roll-up messages that allow you to retrieve information in a similar manner.  The following list shows the target classes for the Rollup message:

TargetRollupActivityPointerByAccount

TargetRollupActivityPointerByContact

TargetRollupActivityPointerByOpportunity

TargetRollupAnnotationByAccount

TargetRollupAnnotationByContact

TargetRollupAnnotationByOpportunity

TargetRollupContractByAccount

TargetRollupContractByContact

TargetRollupIncidentByAccount

TargetRollupIncidentByContact

TargetRollupInvoiceByAccount

TargetRollupInvoiceByContact

TargetRollupOpportunityByAccount

TargetRollupOpportunityByContact

TargetRollupQuoteByAccount

TargetRollupQuoteByContact

TargetRollupSalesOrderByAccount

TargetRollupSalesOrderByContact

TargetRollupDynamic

I haven't worked through all of these messages, but I have tested the Activitypointer ( Activities ) and Annotation ( Notes ) messages, and they work exactly as you would expect.

I did have one problem when I first started playing around this morning: I couldn't make it work.  No matter what I tried, I could not make the rollup message execute successfully.  Luckily, Jonathan Randall, one of the Microsoft Online Support resources, had posted a solution to my exact problem, to another person back in April of 2006.  His code is follows:

  RollupResponse related = null;

  try
  {
	QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression();
	query.EntityName = EntityName.activitypointer.ToString();
	query.ColumnSet = new AllColumns(); 

	TargetRollupActivityPointerByAccount activityRollup =
		new TargetRollupActivityPointerByAccount();
	activityRollup.AccountId = 

                   new Guid("69B242AE-0348-DB11-AAA0-00142A05B544");
	activityRollup.Query = query; 

	RollupRequest rollup = new RollupRequest();
	rollup.ReturnDynamicEntities=false;
	rollup.RollupType=RollupType.Related;
	rollup.Target=activityRollup; 

	related = (RollupResponse)service.Execute(rollup); 

	if (related.BusinessEntityCollection.BusinessEntities.Length >0)
	{
		string txtResults = string.Empty;

		foreach (activitypointer pointer in
			related.BusinessEntityCollection.BusinessEntities)
		{
			txtResults += pointer.subject + " : " +
				pointer.description + " : " +
				pointer.activitytypecode.Value.ToString() +
				" : " +
				pointer.statecode.ToString() +
				Environment.NewLine;
		} 

		MessageBox.Show(txtResults, "Activities");
	}
  }
  catch (System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException err)
  {
	MessageBox.Show(err.Detail.OuterXml.ToString(), "Error");
  }

So what is the big deal?

The problem I was having, was related to the formation of the Query field that is being passed to the Rollup message.  Let's take the TargetRollupActivityPointerByAccount for example.  This message has two fields: AccountId and Query. 

It turns out that the Query field is a query on the Entity being rolled up, not on the parent Entity to which those records belong.  In other words, given the above message, I would specify my Query parameters for the ActivityPointer Entity, not the Account Entity.

TargetRollupAnnotationByAccount works in a similar manner.  We specify Query parameters for the Annotation Entity, not the Account Entity.

Once I understood that little fact, all of the other stuff made perfect sense.

Note: In the example above, we specify no expression filters so the query will return All of the activities.

Reference:

CRM Developer Newsgroup Post