Entity Display Areas and the CRM SiteMap

Posted on November 17th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

If you’ve ever created a custom Entity within CRM you’ve had to make a decision about where this new Entity should be shown using the following checkboxes found at the bottom of the Information screen:

I was replying to a question on one of the CRM Forums where the poster wanted to know where this information was stored.  This turned out to be an excellent question, the answer to which is not readily apparent.

It turns out that there are not actually fields in the database that contain this information.  When you make a change to the display areas and save the Entity, it actually rewrites the XML that is used to display the SiteMap.

That means you can’t just turn these settings on or off programmatically.

You can, however, read this information by using the CRM SDK to query the Organization Entity and retrieving the SiteMapXml property.

Just look for instances where the Entity in question is referenced.

While the SDK clearly states that this field can be written to, I would strongly advise against it unless you have an excellent backup and really know what you’re doing.

Customization, Dynamics CRM

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Interesting Support Article Find: 947096

Posted on November 16th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

When trying to export and/or publish, I ran into this issue this week:

Details: Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown.
Stack trace:
[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.] at Microsoft.Crm.ObjectModel.OrganizationUIService.LabelLoaderAllLanguages.LoadMetadataLabel(Int32 entityType, String attributeName, ExecutionContext context) at Microsoft.Crm.ObjectModel.OrganizationUIService.LabelLoader.LoadCellLabel(Guid cellObjectId, String cellObjectColumnName, Int32 objectType, String attributeName, ExecutionContext context) at …..

After doing some digging, I found this article:

Error message when you export or delete entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: "An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request"

For some reason, we have an issue where something has been deleted from CRM but a reference it still exists somewhere: on the form, a view, etc.  Maybe you deleted the item on purpose or maybe you are moving customizations between servers and you didn’t get all of the referenced entities when you exported.

It’s a little hard to track down sometimes, but you can see things like this on your form:

Or you’ll see the yellow warning symbol on a view column within the View Designer.

Good luck.

Customization, Dynamics CRM

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Hiding the Create New Note Hyperlink on the Notes Tab

Posted on November 13th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

At one of my current customers we had a rather interesting business requirement that I thought I’d share the solution for.

We have an automated system that imports faxes into CRM from a centralized fax gateway product.  We naturally create a Fax Entity record and attach the fax file ( which is a PDF in this case ) to the record.

So far, this is normal business processing.  Here comes the interesting part.

Due to a secondary business requirement, we don’t want users entering Notes on Faxes.  This presents a problem because Attachments are shown as Notes.  Since some issues can’t easily be controlled training, I started looking for a way of restricting the user from creating notes.

Note: I should also mention that all of our Faxes are Incoming, not Outgoing, and we only create inbound faxes programmatically.

Modifying the user’s security role would have worked, mostly, it may have caused problems in the future.  So I decided to invest in a little JavaScript.  This goes in the form OnLoad event of the Fax Entity:

//

// Hide the add note link to prevent users from adding a note manually

//

crmForm.all.tab2Tab.onclick = function() 

{ 

   document.all["notescontrol"].contentWindow.document.all.newNoteButton.style.display = 'none'; 

}

Ok, this is mostly unsupported, but not in a major way.   What we are doing is appending a new Click event on the Notes tab ( which is tab #2, if counting from 0 ).

When a user clicks on the Notes tab, this small bit of JavaScript is executed and the Create new note hyperlink is hidden.

Customization, Dynamics CRM

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Field Level Security White Paper Released

Posted on November 11th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

The Microsoft Engineering for the Enterprise team has released another white paper this week:

Security and Authentication in Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Field-level Security in Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Options and Constraints

Brief Description

While Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not provide for true field-level security, there are a number of options available for using supported custom logic to control of access to data at a more granular level than provided out of the box. This document discusses some of the key options and constraints available for implementing this type of solution.

Overview

This white paper, Field-level Security in Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Options and Constraints, provides selected aspects of the conceptual application of the security model in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. While Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not provide for true field-level security, there are a number of options available for using supported custom logic to control of access to data at a more granular level than provided out of the box. This document discusses some of the key options and constraints available for implementing this type of solution.

Administration, Customization, Dynamics CRM

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Revised CRM SDK 4.0.10

Posted on November 10th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

The initial release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK 4.0.10 contained an incorrect assembly in the SDK\Bin folder. This has been corrected.

Please visit the download page to refresh your copy:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en

The only change to this download package is the contents of the SDK\Bin folder.  The readme has been updated to indicate this change.

Look for this notice:

“November 10, 2009 – Updated the assemblies in the Bin folder. Use these updated assemblies instead of the ones in the previous release of SDK 4.0.10.”

This may take a few hours to propagate across all of the MSDN servers but should be available by Wednesday.

Customization, Development, Dynamics CRM

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CRM SDK 4.0.10 Released

Posted on November 7th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

It looks like the SDK team released a new version this week  Download it here.

Here is what is in this update:

Customization, Dynamics CRM

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Trouble Ticket of the Day

Posted on November 6th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

From a user at one of my customers:

CRM not cooperating.

Hmm, not exactly sure how to respond to that.

Misc

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Closing and Canceling Opportunities

Posted on November 6th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

I am sure that there is another blog that has posted code like this before, but I was cleaning up a project this morning, saw these two methods, and decided to just post them here so I could find them later. :)

These are in C#.  For more information on how they work, please review the CRM SDK.

private void CloseOpportunity(Guid opportunityId, int statusCode, string description)
{
    opportunityclose oppclose = new opportunityclose();
    oppclose.opportunityid = new Lookup();
    oppclose.opportunityid.type = EntityName.opportunity.ToString();
    oppclose.opportunityid.Value = opportunityId;
    oppclose.description = description;
    oppclose.actualend = new CrmDateTime(DateTime.Now.ToString());

    WinOpportunityRequest woReq = new WinOpportunityRequest();
    woReq.OpportunityClose = oppclose;
    woReq.Status = 3;   // Won;

    crmService.Execute(woReq);
}

private void CancelOpportunity(Guid opportunityId, int statusCode, string description)
{
    opportunityclose oppclose = new opportunityclose();
    oppclose.opportunityid = new Lookup();
    oppclose.opportunityid.type = EntityName.opportunity.ToString();
    oppclose.opportunityid.Value = opportunityId;
    oppclose.description = description;
    oppclose.actualend = new CrmDateTime(DateTime.Now.ToString());

    LoseOpportunityRequest woReq = new LoseOpportunityRequest();
    woReq.OpportunityClose = oppclose;
    woReq.Status = statusCode;

    crmService.Execute(woReq);
}

Customization, Development, Dynamics CRM

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CRM Customization Filename Length

Posted on November 4th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

Judging from the error message below, it would appear that there is a limit to the length of a filename you use when importing CRM customizations:

Something to keep in mind.

Customization, Dynamics CRM

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Automating Task Notification

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

If you have ever assigned a task to someone and wondered when or if they completed it, this workflow process may help.

This workflow is based the Task activity, but you can perform the same process on other activities as well.

The workflow will execute when the record’s status changes.

Here is a quick picture of how it is configured.

Our first check is to see if the Task was closed with either a Completed or Canceled status.

If so, then we check the owner.  Is it the same person who created it?  If not, then we will send an email to the creator of the Task, using the following email:

When published, the workflow will generate an email that looks like this:

Customization, Dynamics CRM, Workflow

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