In this video we look at how to create a PowerApp, and connect to the Dynamics 365 instance. We talk about some of the basic commands available and how to work with them.
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This week is MVP Summit week and, since Joel is not around to keep me in check, I’m going wild with the useful tools recommendations.
Have you ever started building a new plugin and then hesitated with the question:
What the heck are those input parameters for the RetreiveMultiple message?
Wonder no more because Blake “MVP can be a hipster too” Scarlavai introduced me to what is going to be one of the most useful tools on my belt: CRM Snoop.
What is it?
CRM Snoop is Sonoma Partners’ proprietary application to help developers troubleshoot and debug plug-ins for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
There is not enough room on this page to describe all the goodness this tool can provide so go ahead, download and take it for a spin. You won’t be disappointed.
Good news for the developers – after long delays and missed Visual Studio releases, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Developer Toolkit has been released as a free Visual Studio extension and is available for download.
The first thing you’d want to do after the installation is to let the tool know where your tools live. Go to Tools > Options in Visual Studio, select CRM Developer Toolkit > Tool Paths and set paths for Plugin Registration tool and SDK bin folder. Then restart Visual Studio.
This version support VS 2012 – 2015, and requires the use of the CRM SDK 8.2 (Note: it does not require you to build for the 8.2 SDK, but it does require the 8.2 SDK to be present on the machine hosting it). The public beta version support Plugins, Workflows, Class Generation, Custom Operations, Workflow generation, debugging and more.
Keep in mind that this is public beta 1 of the toolkit so some bumps are expected.
If you are developer or power user, and don’t mind shooting yourself in a foot, check out Chrome Extension for Dynamics CRM Power users, available as a Chrome extension or as a birthday suit a.k.a. source code.
Just some of our favorite features:
This is a tiny subset of all the features available so do check it out when you have a minute and save yourself hours.
Sometimes we need to call web services from a plugin or a custom workflow activity. For CRM Online it means calling it from the sandbox and there are certain restrictions that apply to the network access.
These restrictions are clear and well understood, however, if you call service over https protocol, one addition restriction applies: the certificate of the site you’re connecting to must be issued by a trusted authority.
Not all authorities are equal and the fact that your client browser trusts a particular authority, does not mean that CRM server will follow the suit. If you try to access a web service over https using HttpClient (or any other client), and certificate issuing authority is not trusted, you will receive a generic error with the exception details containing some particulars:
The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel. System.Security.Authentication.AuthenticationException: The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure.
What certificates seems to be fine on the client side but may cause some drama when accessed in CRM Online? Those issued by (what turns out to be) dodgy authorities of WoSign and StartCom (yours truly was actually a fan of StartCom until they got into the dubious partnership with WoSign), and deservingly so. Unfortunately, certificates issued by new and cool kid on the block, Let’s Encrypt, also got caught, which is not cool at all.
Interestingly enough, all of these certificates are just fine on CRM On-premises (hosted on Windows 2012 R2 server).
Bottom line: if you are using a https web service in a plugin or a custom workflow activity in CRM Online, test it thoroughly.
When you process large data in your code, email attachments, for example, there is always a danger of running out of the available memory. Consider this code dealing with the email attachments:
of the
using (OrganizationServiceContext crmContext = new OrganizationServiceContext(crmSvc))
{
var attachments =
from a in crmContext.CreateQuery("activitymimeattachment")
select new {
body = a.GetAttributeValue<string>("body")
};
foreach (var att in attachments)
{
ProcessAttachment(att);
}
}
The danger here is running out of memory on retrieval of the file attached to the CRM notes. Even though from C# point of view everything is clear, the culprit here is OrganizationServiceContext that keeps all the data retrieved via LINQ queries in the context.
Possible solution to the problem include:
while (recordsExist)
{
pageNumber++;
recordsExist = true;
using (OrganizationServiceContext crmContext
= new OrganizationServiceContext(crmSvc))
{
var attachments =
from a in crmContext.CreateQuery("activitymimeattachment")
select new {
body = a.GetAttributeValue<string>("body")
};
foreach (var att in attachments
.Skip(pageNumber)
.Take(pageSize))
{
recordsExist = true;
ProcessAttachment(att);
}
}
}
var attachments =
from a in crmContext.CreateQuery("activitymimeattachment")
select a;
foreach (var att in attachments)
{
ProcessAttachment(att);
crmContext.Detach(att, true);
}
Woot, woot! At long last we can create passive clients – the ones that do not have someone sitting in front of them. Clients like web sites or services – and authenticate them without using username and password AND get the magic bearer token that is good to use in Web API.
The detailed walkthrough is available, describing in glorious details the process of creating a web site (MVC applicaton) that can talk to Dynamics CRM. Don’t be put off by references to the web sites – you don’t have to be building one to take advantage of the feature. In fact, substantially lesser efforts required to create an equivalent console application that can be deployed as a Web Job and run unattended as a service.
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string organizationUrl = "https://notarealone.crm.dynamics.com";
string clientId = "6db9cae3-dead-beef-dead-7179d4958975";
string appKey = "get you own";
string aadInstance = "https://login.microsoftonline.com/";
string tenantID = "your tenant id";
ClientCredential clientcred = new ClientCredential(clientId, appKey);
AuthenticationContext authenticationContext = new AuthenticationContext(aadInstance + tenantID);
AuthenticationResult authenticationResult = authenticationContext.AcquireToken(organizationUrl, clientcred);
var requestedToken = authenticationResult.AccessToken;
using (var sdkService = new OrganizationWebProxyClient(GetServiceUrl(organizationUrl), false))
{
sdkService.HeaderToken = requestedToken;
OrganizationRequest request = new OrganizationRequest()
{
RequestName = "WhoAmI"
};
WhoAmIResponse response = sdkService.Execute(new WhoAmIRequest()) as WhoAmIResponse;
Console.WriteLine(response.UserId);
}
}
static private Uri GetServiceUrl(string organizationUrl)
{
return new Uri(organizationUrl + @"/xrmservices/2011/organization.svc/web?SdkClientVersion=8.2");
}
Last but not least, to quickly find your tenant id, select application in either Azure portal and ask for Endpoints, your tenant id will be splattered all over endpoint urls as a guid that follows the domain.
As reported in the Dynamics forum, there are known issues with upgrading CRM On Premises to CRM 2016 SP1 if you have full-text indexing enabled. You will get the following error:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot drop index ‘cndx_PrimaryKey_OpportunityProduct’ because it enforces the full-text key for table or indexed view ‘OpportunityProductBase’.
Various posts include SQL scripts to remove the full text index from your CRM database. While these work, they are risky and not supported by Microsoft.
So how do you remove the full text index in a supported way?
After upgrading, you can re-enable full-text Quick Find.
One of the new licenses is Dynamics 365 for Team Members Enterprise Edition, starting at $10 per user per month. As attractive as it sounds, this license comes with some caveats. Before shelling out your credit card and getting this license for all of your users, read the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition Licensing Guide, and get a magnifying glass for small print. But here is what I think is important (as inspired by Jukka “Kalsarikännit” Niiranen‘s comments):
This one is so confusing, it’s worth copying verbatim. “If the custom entity is based on or replicates the functionality of entities included in Microsoft Dynamics 365, or if the entity links to entities included in Microsoft Dynamics 365, then users accessing the custom entity must also be licensed to access the included or replicated entity. For example, users creating an entity that replicates the cases entity for a ticketing system would still require the user to be licensed for cases. In other words, customizations may only be performed against entities users are licensed to access.”
“Based” I understand, “links” I understand, “replicates” – this is so fuzzy I don’t know where to begin. Say, I create “Deal with it” custom entity with a title and a deadline. So far so good. Then I link it to the customer. Is it a ticketing system yet? How about if I add some queuing and deploy workflows to route this item between users. Have I replicated cases yet? Add hierarchical relationship, some status code transition rules. Are we there yet?
As Jukka pointed out, what about custom entities that are clearly out of the contention for now but may overlap with the functionality released by Microsoft in the future? Will you suddenly find yourself in a violation of the licensing agreement?
I can see the intent – nothing new here, this kind of licensing has been around since Microsoft Access 1.0 days – but definition of “replicating” desperately needs to be expanded and explained using more detailed samples.
Team members license is designed as a successor to the ambiguous essential license and, despite some confusion and somewhat fuzzy definitions, it is a huge improvement. My take? Get it for everyone in your organization, make people to share their customer communications via CRM and then see if anyone requires more – and there are plenty of other licenses to choose from.
Following the discussion in the comments section: since version 8.2 customized booking doesn’t apply when using the schedule board daily, weekly, or monthly views. The good news is that this feature is on the roadmap!
Schedule board is one of the centerpieces of the Dynamics 365 for Field Service (yep, that’s the new name). But every time we deployed field service, we’ve been asked to change the default layout that includes Work Order number, and start and end times.
Field Service Documentation defines Scheduler Field Service slot text template as
Enter HTML code to define the text and format that is displayed in the Field Service bookings on the schedule board.
which is not much of a help without the knowledge how to refer to the fields of the Work Order and related entities.
Partner documentation is even more condenscending in the assessment of our abilities:
This is an advanced option! Do NOT try it unless you know HTML.
Well, duh, I know HTML, I’ve been using interwebs since 1988. Long story short:
We have a customer who has quotes linked to Work Order so their current template looks like this (and produces the layout in the image)
<div>
Quote: {msdyn_msdyn_workorder_bookableresourcebooking_WorkOrder.foobar_quoteid}<br/>
{msdyn_msdyn_workorder_bookableresourcebooking_WorkOrder.msdyn_city}<br/>
{msdyn_msdyn_workorder_bookableresourcebooking_WorkOrder.msdyn_account_msdyn_workorder_ServiceAccount.name}<br/>
{msdyn_msdyn_workorder_bookableresourcebooking_WorkOrder.msdyn_account_msdyn_workorder_ServiceAccount.telephone1}
</div>
P.S. Don’t listen to Neil “New CRM Release – New Country” Benson who will tell you he was the one helping me out to figure out the layout.