Today’s tip is from Alex McLachlan (@alex_mcla), saving the day (no kidding – I used it the very next day after receiving the tip). You can be a hero too by emailing your tip to jar@crmtipoftheday.com! With the classic import experience, you couldn’t use a CSV import containing an Alternative Key column to update existing […]
Alternate keys are great way to enforce uniqueness of the column values. For example, if you want lead emails to be truly unique, just add an alternate key and no user will be able to bypass that (unlike the duplicate detection which is a fairly timid mechanism). The challenge is when you want that uniqueness […]
Marius “CRM Viking” Pedersen gave us a great tip about how to prevent duplicate contacts from being created in Dynamics 365: I set emailaddress as alternate key on contact once. That actually worked very well to prevent duplicate contacts from being created. It also required that all contacts must have an email address. You have […]
When you merge two records you may receive the following cryptic message: A record that has the attribute value {1} already exists. The entity key {0} requires that this set of attributes contains unique values. Select unique values and try again What? Select where? That’s really confusing because the merge process is supposed to ignore […]
We did write about pending alternate keys in tips 894 and 894 + 3 and that it’s easy to reactivate the pending keys using solutions UI in Dynamics 365. However, as David “Xrm.Tools” Yack reports, sometimes pending keys are really stubborn and pressing Create Index generates very introspective and philosophical “Exception: Event failed due to […]
The alternate key saga did attract some attention and we received the definite say from Brandon Simons, who’s probably as close to the proverbial Dynamics 365 metal as it gets. tl;dr Alternate keys can be in an inactive state when the definition is created but the unique index is not. These pending keys can be […]
tl;dr If you have duplicate values present in a field, creating alternate key on that field will fail. However, when a solution that includes alternate key is imported into the deployment where duplicates are present, the import does not fail and completes with the warning indicating that alternate key was not created. Long story Not […]
There were many people taking part in this discussion but I’m just going to take all the credit for providing the summary here. Contributors can claim the free drink from me when we meet. If you are planning to use alternate keys to access CRM data, keep in mind that the fields with field […]
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