Mitch Milam's Dynamics CRM and xRM Discussions

I ran into an issue in a plugin this week where I needed to decode the To and From fields of an Email. While this doesn't seem like a huge task, these fields are of the type PartyList, which can be somewhat difficult to work with, at times.

I found the following response by Thomas Dekiere on StackExchange that allowed me to extract the list of recipients (I have made some modifications to his code):

Entity entity = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];

stringsubject = entity.GetAttributeValue<String>("subject");
EntityCollection toCollection = entity.GetAttributeValue<EntityCollection>("to");

for(int i = 0; i < toCollection.Entities.Count; i++)
{
    ActivityParty ap = toCollection[i].ToEntity<ActivityParty>();

    EntityReference party = ap.PartyId;

    // do something with the Entity Reference
}

Here is how you create a PartyList field:

var entity = new Email {
        From = new[]
            {
                new ActivityParty {
                        ParticipationTypeMask = new OptionSetValue(1), // Sender
                        PartyId = user
                    }
            },
        To = new[]
            {
                new ActivityParty
                    {
                        ParticipationTypeMask = new OptionSetValue(2), // ToRecipient
                        PartyId = contact
                    }
            },
        Subject = "test email: " + DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString(),
        RegardingObjectId = contact
    };

Hope that helps.

The Dynamics CRM 2011 December 2012 service update (otherwise code-named Polaris) gave us the new Flow-UI forms. These forms include an auto-save feature that can, and probably will, effect the way we CRM developers approach our work.

If you have not investigated the side-effects and other design-considerations for this new feature, please take a look at the following articles:

Auto Save for Updated User Experience Forms in December 2012 Service Update

Design Considerations for Different Form Presentations

Side effects of the Polaris UI

Here is another cool Entity extension method that I keep forgetting to use: Entity.ToEntityReference.

Normally, when creating a reference to an Entity, we would use something like this:

RetrieveRequest request2 = new RetrieveRequest
{
    Target = new EntityReference(Account.EntityLogicalName, account2.Id),
    ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(),
    RelatedEntitiesQuery = new RelationshipQueryCollection()
};

However, if we have already gone to the trouble of creating or retrieving a record from CRM, we can just use .ToEntityReference, like this:

RetrieveRequest request = new RetrieveRequest
{
    Target = account.ToEntityReference(),
    ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(),
    RelatedEntitiesQuery = new RelationshipQueryCollection()
};

It's a small change, but one that does make your code a little more readable.

When working with the Dynamics CRM SDK, I think we may all overlook a very handy property that can save us a lot of time:Tthe FormattedValues property.

It contains values formatted in the human-readable version of field types such as:

• Option Sets (including State and Status Reason fields)
• Dates
• Currency
• Two-options

Here is an example of the Formatted Values for a Contact (as seen from the Visual Studio Watch window):

Like any collection of values returned from CRM, you will need to verify that the field name exists in the collection using the .Contains operator, but once you have, you can extract the formatted value for use in your own code.

Note: Formatted values are always strings, which is how they are displayed in the CRM user interface.

Anyway, just a quick note to refresh your memory.  Have fun coding.