Another mini truck stop. Subject is somewhat eye-glazing – metadata – but, hey, what do you expect when you put some of the bestest CRM development minds together.

Today’s Roles

The Questioner: Daniel “King of soft” Cai
The Answerer: Jim “Mr SDK” Daly

The Story

T.Q.
The issue is, when using SDK to retrieve the metadata for “from” field in email entity, I found that its LookupAttributeMetadata object’s Targets property has only two values which are “queue” and “systemuser”, this is strange. Technically a CRM email record could be sent from any clients or system users, so the “from” field should be able to also target account, contact and lead entities instead of just two. This is the behavior of the “to” field in the same entity, which has 5 lookup targets including account, contact, lead, queue, and systemuser.

Am I missing something, or could this be a CRM metadata bug (I have run into more than a couple of occasions that CRM metadata is not telling the truth, not sure if this one is a different issue)?

T.A.
[By design.] The basic idea is, we don’t supposedly send an email from a customer when creating an email record through CRM UI, and it makes sense to limit to 2 entities instead of 5.

T.Q.
This makes sense. There are two other scenarios when a FROM could be a client:

• When the email record comes from a different process such email router
• An email is tracked in Outlook

From data manipulation perspective, I would hope that this Targets property can be more accurate, since my application is fully metadata-driven.