Today’s tip comes from Nicholas Hayduk. (You can be a tipster too, just send your revelation to jar@crmtipoftheday.com.)

We recently had a customer who added an SSL certificate to their Adxstudio v7 Portal and now wanted to use the HTTPS version as their main URL. Since their site was hosted in an Azure Web App, we were able to easily add a rewrite rule to force all traffic to HTTPS (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/benjaminperkins/2014/01/07/https-only-on-windows-azure-web-sites/). However, the redirect adds unnecessary overhead, so we wanted to update any links we had to the site to use HTTPS so the overhead could be avoided. One place where links needed to be updated was in their workflows; they had dozens of emails being created in workflows with links back to their websites. Anyone with experience using the email editor in Dynamics 365 knows it can be a bit finicky; we really didn’t want to have to go into all of these emails and change the links. Making matters worse, these emails were html-formatted emails (created by copying HTML into the editor), with many of link URLs not being directly editable, so we would’ve had to start from scratch, including re-adding all of the dynamics fields to the body of the emails. This would’ve taken hours/days with a high likelihood of errors.

Thankfully there was a better way. We exported the solution, unzipped it, and used a find-and-replace tool (http://findandreplace.io/) to quickly and easily change all of the links in workflow emails (each workflow is stored in its own file in the solution, so we wanted a tool that could find and replace across multiple files). We then zipped the solution back up, re-imported, and all was well.

In doing our research to see if this was possible, we did find some horror stories about editing the workflow definition manually causing workflows to no longer be editable in the CRM. This didn’t happen to us; I suspect this isn’t an issue when you are just changing the text in the email body.

Tîpp Jäår $0.02

It’s no longer necessary to edit web.config to force https on your Azure Web App. SSL Settings for the web app now contain a simple HTTPS Only switch. As far as the workflow editing is concerned, the usual Tîpp Jäår’s disclaimer applies: not [currently] supported, use at your own risk, contains small children between the flags, not to be consumed with alcohol while driving.

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