CRMScape

MS CRM ActivityParty REST Queries

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sat, 03 Mar 2018 12:42:00 +0000

I recently had to create a rollup display showing all activities under a given entity. Pulling the sender or receiver out of an email activity requires a few steps.

Adding confusion the email entity has a text field ToRecipients which is an accumulated convenience text field. I would avoid using it as it is not complete if an email is sent to an email address that is not associated with a CRM contact, user etc. In this case the ToRecipients field will be null and the activity party AddressUsed field must be evaluated.

To fully reach the sender and receivers of email activities from an ActivityPointer query, the REST query needs to expand to include the activitypointer_activity_parties link table. You will need the ParticipationTypeMask to find out the role of each related activityparty, and both the AddressUsed and PartyId attributes.

Below is a sample query for all activities (ActivityPointer) related to an entity.


 function retrieveActivities() {

  var caseId = AllCases[ProcessCaseIndex].Id;

  var parameters = "$select=ActivityId, RegardingObjectId, Subject, ActivityTypeCode, CreatedOn, ScheduledStart, Description, StateCode, OwnerId";
  var expandParameters = ",activitypointer_activity_parties/ParticipationTypeMask,activitypointer_activity_parties/PartyId,activitypointer_activity_parties/AddressUsed "; 
  var expand = "&$expand=activitypointer_activity_parties"; 
  var filter = "&$filter=RegardingObjectId/Id eq (guid'" + caseId + "')";
  var orderby = "&$orderby=CreatedOn";
  var options = parameters + expandParameters + expand + orderby + filter;
  SDK.REST.retrieveMultipleRecords("ActivityPointer", options, retrieveActivitiesCallBack, function (error) { alert(error.message); }, activitiesRetrieveComplete);
}

The ActivityPointer.ActivityTypeCode specifies the activity types:

email, appointment, phonecall, task, letter, fax, serviceappointment, campaignactivity, bulkoperation
caseresolution, opportunityclose, quoteclose, campaignresponse

The ParticipationTypeMask specifies the activity party role.
1 From, 2 To, 3 CC, 4 BCC, Owner 9, Regarding 8, and a number of others.

In the following code snipet we are just looking for the Sender or From activity party for email activities. The PartyId.Name is used if available otherwise it looks at the AddressUsed field, but this field is used in all the other email activity parties (From, To, CC, BCC).




     function retrieveActivitiesCallBack(retrievedActivities) {                            
      
        for (var i = 0; i < retrievedActivities.length; i++) {

            var activity = retrievedActivities[i]; 
            
            var type = activity.ActivityTypeCode;
            
            if (type == "email") {                    
                        
            var activityParties = activity.activitypointer_activity_parties.results;
                                    
            for (var j = 0; j < activityParties.length; j++) {

                var activityMask = activityParties[j].ParticipationTypeMask.Value;

                // Sender Only
                if (activityMask == 1) {
                   if (activityParties[j].PartyId.Name == null) {
                        senderName = activityParties[j].AddressUsed
                   }
                   else {
                        senderName = activityParties[j].PartyId.Name;
                   }
                 break;
                 }
           }
    }                                    
        

...

MS CRM Email Template with dynamic id in link

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 14:22:00 +0000

You are trying to create a custom email to a group of contacts and want to create a URL with a contactid in the query string to customize what they see when they click on that link.

It turns out that you need to understand two things to make this work.

In the Template Editor when you press Insert/Update there is no option for the contactid.

#1 Generating a contact id

To create a contactid merge field you need to type the following which is case sensitive.

{!contact:contactid;}

Now Save the Template and this text will turn into a working merge field that returns the contact id of the contact the email is being sent to.

{!Contact:Contact;}

#2 Be careful about links in the Email Template Editor

The following two lines will not be processed the same way when the emails are sent.

The following line will be merged properly and the contact's email browser will typically display a link.

https://www.myportal.com/OrderService.aspx?id={!Contact:Contact;}&type=0

This line may surprise you since the email will look fine but the link won't work.
https://www.myportal.com/OrderService.aspx?id={!Contact:Contact;}&type=0

What you get is the following:

Notice that the text of the link is merged, but the href value is not.

What if you want a nicely formatted link?

Please click here to find out more!

At this point I "believe" your only course of action is to manually modify the XML in the email template body in SQL. I haven't tried that yet, but will post additional information if I do.

MS Dynamics CRM Web Resources Basic Starter Page

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0000

When creating a Web Resource Page in MS CRM there are some basic parts that I've tend to use in all of my pages. These are all contained in the script block above the body.

User Information:

UserId = Xrm.Page.context.getUserId();
UserName = Xrm.Page.context.getUserName();

Query String parameters to drive the page

QueryStringParameters = Xrm.Page.context.getQueryStringParameters();

QueryStringParm = "None";

if (QueryStringParameters["feature"] != null) {

QueryStringParm = QueryStringParameters["feature"].toString();
}

Entity Id - when you are running in a Form iframe and the entity has been saved.

EntityId = window.parent.Xrm.Page.data.entity.getId();

Id = QueryStringParameters["id"].toString();

Trigger for Query

document.onreadystatechange = function () {

if (document.readyState == "complete") {

// Typically call a query to populate the page

}
}

Function to Open a CRM Form in a new window

function OpenCRMForm(entityName, entityId) {

var windowOptions = {
openInNewWindow: true
};

Xrm.Utility.openEntityForm(entityName, entityId, null, windowOptions);

}

On Premises MS CRM 2011 to CRM 2015 Upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 12:56:00 +0000

Other than my CRM Online customers, the rest of my customer base which are using on premises systems still run CRM 2011 and are looking to upgrade to CRM 2015. While my customer base is a small subset of the microcosm, I am betting they are not alone. This is a high level overview that I will modify and embellish over time.

This upgrade will need to be done in stages and will require an intermediate upgrade to CRM 2013.

Step 1: Upgrade your SQL server system if necessary:

CRM 2015 discontinues support for SQL Server 2008 / 2008R2

However CRM 2015 continues to support Windows 2008 / 2008R2

Step 2: Any CRM 4.0 SDK solutions will no longer be supported, so make sure that all of your solutions are using the CRM 2011 SDK as a starting point. This includes all of your plugins, custom workflows, web applications and scheduled applications that use the CRM API.

Step 3: it is recommended that CRM 2011 should be updated to Rollup 14 before starting.

Step 4: Run the Custom Code Validation Tool to test your JavaScript Form customizations. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2012/06/21/microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-custom-code-validation-tool-released.aspx

Step 5: Run the Legacy Feature Check Tool to see if you are still using any CRM 4.0 API calls.

Warning: Inventory any SQL Views or direct SQL queries or updates that you may have created against the actual CRM database tables. It is recommended to always use the CRM Views and not access the CRM database directly, but in the event that you did anything unsupported, the Base and Extension tables will be merged at the end of this process.

Running the CRM 2013 Upgrade

There are 3 upgrade options ranging from upgrading In-place which is over the top of your existing system to migrating your data from your existing CRM system to a completely new CRM 2013 system.

If you have VM’s you will want to try the In-place upgrade first as it updates similar to a rollup and if successful is the fastest.

CRM 2013 Modifications

Optional 1: Most of the XRM systems I’ve worked on have numerous plugins that fire when the vast majority of the CRM entities are modified. If you have a large number of plugins that fire like this and your system could be bogged down by frequent saves by your users, you may consider disabling the new Autosave feature in 2013 at least initially.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2013/10/15/manage-auto-save.aspx

This feature can be disabled on a form by form basis later.

Optional 2: Microsoft recommends migrating to the new forms created for each entity in 2013. The CRM 2011 forms will be named “Information”. The new 2013 forms will have the entity name like “Account”. From the new entity form there is a Merge feature that will pull the customizations from the 2011 form and put those customizations at the bottom of the form. There will be some work to clean these forms up.

Optional 3: You can merge your database in 2013 however this is a required step in the CRM 2015 Upgrade, so I prefer to let the latest upgrade code take care of this step. This is the merger of the Base and Extension tables in the CRM database.

Running the CRM 2015 Upgrade

There are 3 upgrade options ranging from upgrading In-place which is over the top of your existing system to migrating your data from your existing CRM system to a completely new CRM 2013 system.

Since this is the step when the database tables will be merged, I would suggest going with the MS recommendation to migrate from the Updated 2013 system to a fresh CRM 2015 system especially on a production system. If you have VM copies to play with, upgrading In-place is less of a risk.

CRM 2015 Modifications

MS says that CRM 2015 will use CRM 2011 SDK plugins but substitute calls to the 2011 SDK with calls from the CRM 2015 SDK.

However there are some important changes that need to be handled.

As of CRM 2015 Update 1 which is currently only used on CRM Online as I type this. For plugin registration the SetState and Assign messages have been deprecated. Ownership and the state of an entity can now be changed using Update rather than separate AssignRequest and SetStateRequest messages.

Once your plugins are registered to fire on “Update” make sure to set their filtering attributes to be appropriate “ownerid” and “statecode” for example and you may need to check your execution order if you have other plugins firing on the Update of an entity.

MS CRM 2013 Online upgrade to Office 365 authentication

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 16:25:00 +0000

Recently many CRM Online customers were transitioned from Live ID to Office 365 authentication.

The result is that the earlier Live ID users accounts no longer exist and any software still using Live ID authentication stopped working.

This requires updating how any portal code authenticates and using a new Office 365 user account to authenticate with.

In addition the CRM 2013 Email Router needs to be reconfigured and updated to the Rollup 2 version ( at this moment in time ).

O365 Authentication

If you start with the latest CRM 2013 SDK example AuthenticateWithNoHelp solution, you can add the code snippet below to the file AuthenticateWithNoHelp.cs to get O365 authentication to work.

First open and compile this solution. Than add the code snippet below to the AuthenticationWithNoHelp class.

The following gives you an IOrganizationService and an IOrganizationServiceContext

If you are incorporating this into an existing CRM 2011 solution, you will need to update your Microsoft.Xrm.Client and Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk references.

The global variables beginning with underscores are used internally in the AuthenticationWithNoHelp class. Substitute your organization name for {orgname}.

public IOrganizationService OrgService { get; set; }
public OrganizationServiceContext OrgContext { get; set; }

private String _discoveryServiceAddress = "https://dev.crm.dynamics.com/XRMServices/2011/Discovery.svc";
private String _userName = "newusername@{orgname}.onmicrosoft.com";
private String _password = "password";
private String _domain = ""; 


public Authenticate()
{
    IServiceManagement<IDiscoveryService> serviceManagement = ServiceConfigurationFactory.CreateManagement<IDiscoveryService>(new Uri(_discoveryServiceAddress));
    AuthenticationProviderType endpointType = serviceManagement.AuthenticationType;
    
    IServiceManagement<IOrganizationService> orgServiceManagement = ServiceConfigurationFactory.
        CreateManagement<IOrganizationService>( new Uri("https://{orgname}.api.crm.dynamics.com/XrmServices/2011/Organization.svc "));

    AuthenticationCredentials credentials = GetCredentials(orgServiceManagement, endpointType);
    
    using (OrganizationServiceProxy organizationProxy =
        GetProxy<IOrganizationService, OrganizationServiceProxy>(orgServiceManagement, credentials))
    {
        OrgService = organizationProxy;

        organizationProxy.EnableProxyTypes();
     
        OrgContext = new OrganizationServiceContext(organizationProxy);
    }
}

Email Router

If you are running an older version of the email router update to the appropriate 32 or 64 bit version found here.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42272
Install and reboot.

To reconfigure your Email Router:

1. Change the Server URL from dev.crm.dynamics.com to disco.crm.dynamics.com

2. Change the User Name and Password to new a new Office 365 account

Then under Configuration Profiles Set the Outgoing Access Credentials to match the Office 365 Credentials used above.

Now

Publish your changes
Load Data
Test Access

That may not cover every Email Router configuration change, but it should cover most of them.

MS CRM and Portals (fast caching method)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:29:00 +0000

Let’s say that you have a portal application that is very data driven by highly related data, or that has some displays that require a lot of heavily related data to very flexibly dynamically build the controls on the pages. Leveraging the quick prototyping of MS CRM to design your schema, and managing this controlling data within MS CRM helps abstract away a lot of grunt work and very quickly get your portal online, but the time required to retrieve a long stream of related data by web services is affecting the performance of your website. Because your pages are very data driven depending on the user who logs in some of the website caching available out of the box isn’t helping much because of many web services calls required to customized the information.

What if you could cache all of this related data that you needed in an extremely quick and efficient way so that the portal could get the data that drives it in an nearly instant way?

In this example there is a MS CRM Online system and an interactive Dashboard displayed on a Portal. This is a simple example, but the real project contains a very large amount of data nested many levels deep. All the queries by web services would take well over a minute or two to run, but a typical portal user is not that patient.

Caching Mechanism

Advantages of this mechanism:

1. Requires a single select to a local database to fetch extremely complex relational data that is already organized into a consumable format.

2. Utilizes a background task to do the heavy lifting to keep things up to date without the portal user having to wait for a many web services calls to MS CRM and also allows for processing of the raw data if need be.

3. Can be part of a plan to allow a portal to be self sufficient for periods of time when the CRM system is not available.

Overview

Part 1: Filling the Cache

Query data from MS CRM via web services in a background task. This could be a scheduled applications or service on a timer that keeps the cached updated.
Put data into related serializable containers under one container with all of the information needed for a single account in the format needed to drive your application.
Serialize this container
Write it to the local SQL database as a single blob with an identifier.

Part 2: Reading the Cache:

With a single select from the local database return the entire blob of information needed.
Deserialize this blob
Cast it to the Parent container class.
Consume it in your Portal application.

Example Code

This example is very simplistic. The class structure and queries to pull MS CRM data can be as complex as needed. The real gains to using this are when there is a lot of related data requiring a large number of queries.

Nested Serialized Classes

All classes must be serializable. The top level container class will contain all other containers or lists of containers

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;


/// <summary>
/// Top Level Serializable Container 
/// All classes contained must also be serializable 
/// </summary>
[Serializable]
public class DashboardBlob
{
    public Guid AccountId;
    public DateTime LastUpdated;
    public List<ContactS> students = new List<ContactS>();
}

/// <summary>
/// Nested Serializable class
/// </summary>
[Serializable]
public class ContactS
{
    public Guid ContactId;
    public string FirstName;
    public string LastName;
    public string EMailAddress1;
}

Filling the Serialized Classes

This can be done in any way that queries the data needed and fills the appropriate serialized classes.

/// <summary>
/// Create Top level container and call methods to fill all nested containers
/// </summary>
/// <param name="accountId"></param>
public static DashboardBlob FillDashboardBlob(Guid accountId)
{
    var blob = new DashboardBlob
        {
            AccountId = accountId,
            LastUpdated = DateTime.Now,
            students = GetSerializedContactsByAccount(accountId)
            //pull all other related data and nested data.
        };

    return blob;
}

/// <summary>
/// Query that pulls data from a CRM context and stores it in a serializable class
/// </summary>
/// <param name="accountId"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static List<ContactS> GetSerializedContactsByAccount(Guid accountId)
{
    var serializedContacts = 
        (from c in DemoContext.ContactSet
        join students in DemoContext.new_account_studentSet on c.ContactId equals students.contactid
        where students.new_accountid == accountId
        orderby c.LastName, c.FirstName
        select new ContactS
        {
            ContactId = c.ContactId.Value,
            FirstName = c.FirstName,
            LastName = c.LastName,
            EMailAddress1 = c.EMailAddress1
        }).ToList();

    return serializedContacts;
}

The code below this point is nearly generic with the exception of the field names for your SQL tables.

Create a simple local SQL table for cache storage

Save/Update the Local SQL Cache

Now that you have the data stored in a serialized container, serialize that container and store in the local SQL server database as a blob.

/// <summary>
/// Update that writes the blob back to SQL
/// </summary>
/// <param name="blob"></param>
/// <param name="connectionString"></param>
/// <param name="isCreate"></param>
public static void SaveUpdateDashboardBlob(DashboardBlob blob, string connectionString, bool isCreate)
{
    var bytes = SerializeAnObject(blob);
    var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
    SqlCommand sqlCmd;
    connection.Open();
    if( isCreate) 
        sqlCmd = new SqlCommand("INSERT INTO dbo.MainCache(accountid,updated,dashboardxml) VALUES (@id,@updated,@xml)", connection);
    else
        sqlCmd = new SqlCommand("UPDATE dbo.MainCache Set updated=@updated, dashboardxml=@xml where accountid=@id", connection);
    sqlCmd.Parameters.Add("@id", SqlDbType.UniqueIdentifier);
    sqlCmd.Parameters["@id"].Value = blob.AccountId;
    sqlCmd.Parameters.Add("@updated", SqlDbType.DateTime);
    sqlCmd.Parameters["@updated"].Value = blob.LastUpdated;
    sqlCmd.Parameters.Add("@xml", SqlDbType.Xml, Int32.MaxValue);
    sqlCmd.Parameters["@xml"].Value = bytes;
    sqlCmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
    connection.Close();
}

public static string SerializeAnObject(object AnObject)
{
    var Xml_Serializer = new XmlSerializer(AnObject.GetType());
    var Writer = new StringWriter();
    Xml_Serializer.Serialize(Writer, AnObject);
    return Writer.ToString();
}

Read the Local SQL Cache

This is the payoff. A single call to the local database returns a completely organized sorted and ready for consumption data container.

/// <summary>
/// Read the blob from local SQL database, deserialize it and cast it back to the container class.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="accountId"></param>
/// <param name="connectionString"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static DashboardBlob GetDashboardBlob(Guid accountId, string connectionString)
{
    var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
    connection.Open();
    var adapter = new SqlDataAdapter(string.Format("select dashboardxml from dbo.MainCache where accountid='{0}' ", accountId), connection);
    var ds = new DataSet();
    adapter.Fill(ds);
    DataTable table = ds.Tables[0];
    connection.Close();

    if (table.Rows.Count != 0)
    {
        var data = (DashboardBlob)DeSerializeAnObject(table.Rows[0][0].ToString(), typeof(DashboardBlob));
        return data;
    }
    return null;
}

public static Object DeSerializeAnObject(string xmlOfAnObject, Type objectType)
{
    var strReader = new StringReader(xmlOfAnObject);
    var xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(objectType);
    var xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(strReader);
    try
    {
        Object anObject = xmlSerializer.Deserialize(xmlReader);
        return anObject;
    }
    finally
    {
        xmlReader.Close();
        strReader.Close();
    }
}

The new MS CRM 2011 64 bit VM and VirtualBox

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 20:15:00 +0000

I’ve gotten a number of emails asking what was needed to get the new Partner Source MS CRM 2011 64bit Virtual Machine to work in Virtual Box in Windows 7.

The compatibility issue appears to be the default hard disk settings. The following is a workaround that has worked for many people. I’ve been told this doesn’t work on Windows 2008 Servers, but on a 2008 server you could also run Hyper-V.

Change your VHD to run from an IDE controller:

Open up your storage settings and add the vhd as an IDE drive. Click the right + icon to create a new virtual hard drive. Choose an existing drive.

Select the VHD file the you decompressed and open it.

Now remove your SATA drive

Now Click OK.

Memory

This VM likes 2.5Gb or more RAM to operate in. As always more is better especially if you are going to demonstrate both CRM and SharePoint together.

Now Start it up!

Addendum

You should enable hardware virtualization when running 64-bit OS’s. This is a firmware setting on your motherboard. This is normally called “Intel Virtualization”, “VT-x” or “Intel VT” and AMD has an equivalent setting. Laptops frequently have this disabled by default.

CRM 2011 OData, JSON and CRM Forms

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:10:00 +0000

1. Generating OData queries

OData commands can easily be tested out in IE. To help with this, you will want to turn off the feed reading view in IE.

The first thing that you will want is the name of the Sets that you will be calling on. If you use a path like the following it will provide a listing of the names of your sets. http://crmdev:5555/CRMDEV/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc

You will see a list of them in the following format.

- <collection href="AccountSet">
  <atom:title>AccountSet</atom:title> 
  </collection>

Since these names are case sensitive you will want to look at the names of your custom entities. Your stock items like AccountSet and ContactSet will be camel cased, but your custom entities will likely show up as new_myentitySet.

http://crmdev:5555/CRMDEV/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/AccountSet

As you can see the field names use the Schema Name in CRM rather than the lowercase name the is used on the CRM forms. This is something that can cause confusion.

<d:Address1_Name m:null="true" />
<d:Address1_Telephone2 m:null="true" />
<d:OverriddenCreatedOn m:type="Edm.DateTime" m:null="true" />
<d:Telephone3 m:null="true" />
<d:DoNotBulkPostalMail m:type="Edm.Boolean">false</d:DoNotBulkPostalMail>

If you specify the guid of that entity, the results returned will be for that one entity. All fields are returned whether they are null or not. This listing will show you the exact case of each attribute name that you may want to query.

http://crmdev:5555/CRMDEV/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/AccountSet(guid'3D37ACD3-5846-E011-8AE1-080027131692')

You can save bandwidth by only selecting the fields that you need and only those fields will be returned. Below will only return the AccountNumber and AccountName

http://crmdev:5555/CRMDEV/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/AccountSet(guid'{3D37ACD3-5846-E011-8AE1-080027131692}')?$select=AccountNumber,AccountName

There are numerous references from MS explaining how to build OData Queries, however, Rhett Clinton’s recent addition to Codeplex is probably the easiest way to generate these queries. His tool can be found at the link below.

http://crm2011odatatool.codeplex.com/

Screen shot of his Query Designer

2. Using OData Queries with JSON

To use any of the following in a javascript library as webresource in CRM 2011 solution, you will first need to include a jquery library and a json library. The jquery1.4.1.min.js and json2.js files can be found in the most recent MS CRM SDK. sdk\samplecode\js\restendpoint\jqueryrestdataoperations\jqueryrestdataoperations\scripts. Add these a libraries and include them above the JavaScript library that you put your code in. Click here to see what that looks like in the Forms Property page.

To utilize these OData queries in a CRM Form using JSON, there is a pretty standard template to use. Just set the odataSelect below to your OData select url, and use the appropriate return method.

var odataSelect = "Your OData Query";

$.ajax({
       type: "GET",
       contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
       datatype: "json",
       url: odataSelect,
       beforeSend: function (XMLHttpRequest) { XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json"); },
       success: function (data, textStatus, XmlHttpRequest) 
           { 
               // Use only one of these two methods

               // Use for a selection that may return multiple entities
               ProcessReturnedEntities(data.d.results); 

               // Use for a single selected entity
               ProcessReturnedEntity(data.d);
           
           },
       error: function (XmlHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) { alert('OData Select Failed: ' + odataSelect); }
   });

Notice the two methods:

ProcessReturnedEntities(data.d.results)
ProcessReturnedEntity(data.d)

When selecting what could be any number of entities, there will be an array returned, and you want to look at the data.d.results. When selecting a specific Guid there is no results array created, and you will need to just look at the data.d that is returned.

For example:

function ProcessReturnedEntities(ManyEntities)
{
  for( i=0; i< ManyEntities.length; i++)
  {
     var oneEntity = ManyEntities[i];
     var accountNumberAttribute = oneEntity.AccountNumber;    
     
     var accountNumberValue = eval(oneEntity.AccountNumber);
  }
}

function ProcessReturnedEntity(OneEntity)
{  
     var oneEntity = OneEntity;
     var accountNumber = oneEntity.AccountNumber;
     
     var accountNumberValue = eval(oneEntity.AccountNumber);     
}

Entity Attributes

As you can see the JavaScript entity objects returned have attributes named with matching camel casing in the OData query.

In that case of simple CRM attributes like:

string
memo
decimal
double
integer

You can get the value from them by simply using eval like shown in the example above.

For the following CRM attributes there is more involved.

optionset
money
datetime
lookup

For example:

var moneyValue = eval( oneEntity.new_MoneyAttribute.Value);
var optionSetValue = eval ( oneEntity.new_OptionSet.Value);

Setting CRM Form Fields with Queried Values

This gets a bit more complex when setting values to CRM form controls.

The form field names are all lower case, so the retrieved names do not match.
The form fields have validation and maintain more types than the returned OData values have.
There is some conversion required between them.

You can find out the type of a form control as follows:

var attrType = Xrm.Page.getAttribute("accountnumber").getAttributeType();

With the type you can then use the appropriate means to set form controls.

string, memo fields:

Xrm.Page.getAttribute("accountnumber").setValue(eval(oneEntity.AccountNumber));

decimal, double fields:

Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_float").setValue(parseFloat(eval(oneEntity.new_Float)));

integer fields

Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_integer").setValue(parseInt(eval(oneEntity.new_Integer)));

money fields

Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_moneyattribute").setValue(parseFloat(eval(oneEntity.new_MoneyAttribute.Value)));

optionset fields

Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_optionset").setValue(eval(oneEntity.new_OptionSet.Value));

date fields

var fieldValue = eval(oneEntity.new_DateTime);                       
var dateValue = new Date(parseInt(fieldValue.replace("/Date(", "").replace(")/", ""), 10));
Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_datetime").setValue(dateValue);

The addition of support for JSON, OData queries in MS CRM 2011 has

added some great power to what can be done easily in the JavaScript of a CRM form. This should reduce the number of solutions that require web applications running in iframes dramatically. This is a good thing since MS is phasing out the ISV folder for web applications running in the same app pool on a web server and there is currently no support for aspx files in CRM solutions.

CRM 2011 Set Default Transaction Currency in JavaScript

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:23:00 +0000

The following function uses JSON and OData to select the first Currency entity that is configured on your system and then sets the transactioncurrencyid lookup to be that currency.

This particular feature is just as relevant for CRM 2011 as it was for CRM 4.0, but it is easier to implement now.

The OData selection for this consists of the following:
/TransactionCurrencySet?$select=TransactionCurrencyId,CurrencyName

If you have multiple currencies, you can always add a filter to OData select to grab the specific currency that you need. This function uses the first currency returned.

function SetDefaultCurrency()
{
    var context = Xrm.Page.context;
    var serverUrl = context.getServerUrl();
    var ODataPath = serverUrl + "/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc";   
    var odataSelect = ODataPath + "/TransactionCurrencySet?$select=TransactionCurrencyId,CurrencyName";

    $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        datatype: "json",
        url: odataSelect,
        beforeSend: function (XMLHttpRequest) { XMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json"); },
        success: function (data, textStatus, XmlHttpRequest)
        {            
            var myCurrency = data.d.results[0];
            var idValue = eval('myCurrency.TransactionCurrencyId');
            var textValue = eval('myCurrency.CurrencyName');    
            var thisEntityType = 'transactioncurrency';            
            Xrm.Page.getAttribute("transactioncurrencyid").setValue([{ id: idValue, name: textValue, entityType: thisEntityType }]);         
        },
        error: function (XmlHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) { alert('OData Select Failed: ' + odataSelect); }
    });
}

In order to use this. You need to make sure that you include jquery1.4.1.min.js and json2.js as libraries first since this script relies on them. Create another library with the above function. If you just call the SetDefaultCurrency function in the OnLoad event of your form, the currency will be set as the form opens and will be be ready for you to set any currency values that rely on this.

The jquery1.4.1.min.js and json.js files can be found in the most recent MS CRM SDK. sdk\samplecode\js\restendpoint\jqueryrestdataoperations\jqueryrestdataoperations\scripts

CRM 2011 RTM VM Installation Differences

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:46:00 +0000

There are a few differences between the RTM installation and the Beta installation I have documented in earlier blog articles. Starting with the following: http://crmscape.blogspot.com/2010/09/creating-ms-crm-2011-vm-part-1-of-2.html

1. There are minor appearance changes in the CRM 2011 Installation screens, but everything else looks close enough that the Beta instructions still work.

2. The entire section of my instructions called SQL Reporting Services ( Configure Data Source ) is unnecessary, which is an improvement. However I did add my Admin user account to the PrivUserGroup and PrivReportingGroup and then everything worked great.

Otherwise the instructions still worked well for me. I’ll look over the updated installations instructions shortly to make sure there isn’t anything of importance that needs to be added.

I’m also using the latest Virtual Box 4.0.4 release for this which is working well. The only reason I used it instead of VMWare is that I had an existing VM just waiting for MS CRM to be installed with all the prerequisites in place.

I’ve been “living on a cloud” for the past few months in CRM Online and Windows/SQL Azure land, but now that the 2011 On Premises release is out, I’m back on terra firma working with that again too.

MS CRM 2011, the “Cloud”, Azure and the future

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:56:00 +0000

Something really important is happening right now, and if you are involved in MS CRM take notice or fall by the wayside! This is a real game changer!

Almost all of my MS CRM installations were on premises installations until just this Fall. Sure there were IFD configurations and web portals with Silverlight etc., but the customer was always in tight control of the servers, even if the servers were hosted.

I thought the next big thing would be the tighter SharePoint 2010 integration with MS CRM 2011 and to be fair I have seen interest in that and it will be a growing thing.

What I didn’t expect is that suddenly I would almost exclusively be working with hosted MS CRM systems, MS CRM Online and Windows Azure and SQL Azure. BTW I’ll be working with the new SQL Azure Reporting Services CTP this week as well.

What is pretty obvious is that MS has a lot of technologies coming together at about the time that MS CRM 2011 is hitting the scene. Frankly I thought it all looked interesting, but I didn’t expect the market to react so quickly or for it all to fit together so well.

What I also didn’t expect was how much I would enjoy this transfer of responsibility. I enjoy being in control of things, but I also love abstracting away busy work to concentrate on solving real problems. That is the point of MS CRM. System administration work is not where the fun is, at least for me.

I was also pleasantly surprised at how easy using SQL Azure is. Just make sure you are using SQL 2008 R2 Management Studio and it is really nothing more than setting up an IP range you will be connecting through in the Azure portal, and changing your connection string. All of your tables need to have Clustered indexes as well and you have to use SQL scripts for all of your modifications, but otherwise it is just like the SQL you already know. Another thing to beware of is that the Web database is 1-5Gb and if you expect to grow beyond that you need to start with a Business Database which starts at 10Gb and can grow to 50Gb.

I’m currently working on a project that is using an Azure 10Gb database, the new to SQL 2008 geography fields and spatial indexes. I imported about 7Gb of data in about 3.5 hours. The database has been very responsive. I did notice that when I ran a very intensive task like generating a Spatial index across 9.2 million records that it would occasionally idle my process, but it still finished in a respectable time.

Windows Azure, likewise, was very easy to set up. Install the Azure SDK, create a Cloud Service Project, setup the Diagnostics and build a web application. If you make the Cloud Service your Start project it can be debugged locally as it will be deployed. There are a few configuration switches, but then again you are abstracting away all of the IIS administration.

Where this all gets interesting is that additional instances of your application can be added with a few key clicks and without purchasing equipment or understanding anything about network load balancing. Adjust the amount of CPU cores and memory your application needs as it grows. Scale it back during the off season or grow though the ceiling.

I have customers who want to scale up quickly to compete with some pretty large competitors with a better product, but without the infrastructure or small army to maintain it. The Azure platform allows a small guy with a better mousetrap to take on the world.

As a lone gun for hire, without a staff of sysadmins, what this means to me is that I can create some really really big solutions very quickly and without the setup time normally involved, or the meetings with IT departments to budget for servers, and schedule for installation and configuration.

What this also is going to do is let a lot more killer apps actually see the light of day. I think we are going to see a new wave of enabled developers make a lot of really cool things happen.

The cost of admission to see if something will stick has really dropped and if your solution is really that good and your website is nailed with traffic, all you need is a few key clicks to give you more bandwidth, memory and processing power.

I was a bit skeptical at first, but as the saying goes, “People vote with their wallets”. Based on what I am seeing the people are voting and much quicker than I expected!

MS CRM Custom Workflow CreateCrmService permissions

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:23:00 +0000

If you are writing custom workflows and calling CRM services, you are probably familiar with the following code which creates a service with system administrator access to all data. ( true = administrator access )

ICrmService service = context.CreateCrmService(true);

You may have noticed that any entities created by a custom workflow using this administrator access default to being created and owned by the account that your Microsoft CRM Asynchronous Processing Service runs as.

This has some trickle down depending on the account your async service is using.

For example if you are using the Local System Account which “typically” does not have a CRM user account dedicated to it, there are some things that you won’t have permission to do.

For example the Local System account doesn’t have permission to send an email and the following will fail even with a service having administrator access.

var sendRequest = new SendEmailRequest
             {
                 EmailId = emailId,
                 IssueSend = true,
                 TrackingToken = String.Empty
             };

sendEmailService.Execute(sendRequest);

This will give you the following SoapException:

<error>
<code>0x80040216</code>
<description>An unexpected error occurred.</description>
<type>Platform</type>
</error>

You could create another service reference like below just to send email with which will work as long as the user running the workflow can normally send an email from a workflow.

ICrmService sendEmailService = context.CreateCrmService(false);

You could also use a CRM user CAL and create a CRM user for the account your async service runs as.

The important thing to realize is that any service request that requires user configuration in order to function beyond security role permissions will be dependent on whether there is a CRM user assigned to the account the acync service is running under and how that CRM user is configured. For example: whether the email access type is E-mail Router.

Developing for CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010 Foundation

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:58:00 +0000

If you are a MS CRM person looking at SharePoint as something new here are a few things that may be of interest.

The SharePoint 2010 Foundation is free and will work with the MS CRM list component but it is limited to database sizes of 4Gb. This makes it much easier to leverage some of the power of SharePoint for your CRM customers. Your customers by default already have licensing for Windows Server and SQL Server in order to run MS CRM and SharePoint Foundation can share that same server.

In addition the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) are also supported by SharePoint Foundation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557646.aspx

BCS will allow you to expose data from other databases to show up in SharePoint, but not take space in the SharePoint database, this of course includes CRM data. There is obviously a performance penalty depending on the interface to access this external data, but it also allows maintaining legacy databases while having access to that data in SharePoint without passing the 4Gb database limit in the SharePoint database.

If you are looking at SharePoint integration using their web services, you can see from the following link which services are supported by both SharePoint Foundation and by SharePoint Server and just by SharePoint Server. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee705814.aspx

As an obvious guideline it would make sense to write your base code to support SharePoint Foundation to let customers try out SharePoint functionality, and to have any features that require SharePoint Server features be switchable at a later time if your customer upgrades.

SharePoint Server has a number of useful features shown in this version comparison that you may or may not need: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx

As a practical note, SP 2010 is built on .NET 3.5 and CRM 2011 is built on .NET 4.0, so while most of you will not have a lot of .NET 4.0 legacy code at this point, is will be important to make sure your libraries with logic that will be shared between SP and CRM components are all kept at .NET 3.5.

Connecting to MS CRM 2011 outside the VM

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:10:00 +0000

While the CRM 2011 VM created so far works well by itself, you will most likely want to access MS CRM web site, web services and endpoints from outside the VM for development purposes.

To do this you will need to set up VirtualBox to allow access from your host computer.

1. With your VM shutdown, modify the Network Settings and enable the second Adapter. As shown below:

Attached to: Host-Only Adapter
Name: VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter

Note: when a VM is created from scratch it appears to select the correct network adapter type. When I copied the VDI file to my laptop and setup a VM based on that VDI file, it picked a different adapter by default and the networking didn’t work until I made it match the original Network settings that I had when I first configured it.

2. Start up your VM, open up a command prompt and run ipconfig. Notice the new Local Area Connection 2 should be in your local network. The other is the default NAT adapter that allows your VM to see the Internet as your host computer.

3. On your host computer go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and edit your hosts file and add the new IP address to your hosts file.

4.You may want to add a new Credential to your Credential Manager to reduce your login time under Control Panel since you are not in the domain of the VM.

Use the Hosts alias created above, then add a domain\username, and password. This will give you a mostly filled out login when you try to reach the website for the first time.

5. Test the connection out by bringing up MS CRM on your host. I’m using the alias in my hosts file pull up CRM. http://w2008r2crmdev:5555/CRMDEMO

6. Now make sure you can access the endpoints through the browser

http://w2008r2crmdev:5555/CRMDEMO/xrmservices/2011/organizationdata.svc/$metadata
http://w2008r2crmdev:5555/CRMDEMO/xrmservices/2011/organizationdata.svc/

7. If the endpoints show up in the browser than they should be available to add a reference to a Silverlight project as shown below.

Side Note: I have found that this VM is capable of running with 2.3Gb of RAM and on one core on my 2 year old Core Duo laptop. There is just enough memory to run VS 2010 on the host and connect to the guest VM’s endpoints as shown above in the 4Gb of RAM my laptop has. This is by no means an optimum configuration, but it is possible to demonstrate CRM 2011 beta with SharePoint integration and write code against both SDK’s.

MS CRM 2011 SharePoint List Component Installation

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Warning if you downloaded the file just as this was introduced it contains an unsigned assembly that will give you an error message shown when you would see it during the installation below. A fix was put out by MS a few days later. If in doubt download it again.

Download the SharePoint List Component
CRM2011-SharePointList-ENU-amd64.exe file and run it on your VM.

Accept the Conditions

Pick a place to unpack the contents. You will be browsing to the crmlistcomponent.wsp file from SharePoint later.

Before installing the List component you need to relax the Browser File Handling to “Permissive” for the Web application that you are sharing with MS CRM 2011.

Go to SharePoint Central Administration and click on Manage web applications.

Select the web application that you are sharing with MS CRM and click on General Settings.

Scroll down to Browser File Handling and click on permissive then scroll to the bottom and click OK.

Now visit your SharePoint Site and click on Site Actions then Site Settings.

Click on Solutions under Galleries

Click the Solutions Tab, and a ribbon will appear. Click on Upload Solution in that Ribbon.

Now browse to the crmlistcomponent.wsp file that was unpacked earlier and click OK.

Now you need to Activate this solution.

Note: The error below will only happen if you are still using the Initial download of the CRM2011-SharePointList-ENU-amd64.exe file.

You should see this if you have the right version.

The SharePoint List Component is now in place.

To test this in CRM.

Go to Settings, Document Management and click on Document Management Settings. Enter your shared SharePoint site. Click Next

You can pick Account, Contact or not select where you Document Library will be based. I selected Account below. Click Next

When it is all done, click finish.

Create a Test Account if you don’t already have one. Add a document of some kind. It will prompt you for a location to automatically create a SharePoint Folder the first time you do this per Account. Click OK.

Click the Open SharePoint link to see the document in SharePoint. Both sides can now work with documents in this folder.

MS CRM 2011 Beta VM Continued.. Customizations

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 19:30:00 +0000

As my instructions left off, trying to publish a CRM customization and exporting customizations will fail with a SQL error. This is because the administrator currently doesn’t have adequate permissions.

Since the Administrator account has the Administrator security role this should not be an issue.

In a production system we should not be giving the Administrator account direct access the <orgname>_MSCRM database as dbo in SQL Management Studio, but that will work for the VM. However I believe the user should instead belong to a group with the proper permissions. In this case I added the Administrator user to the SQLAccessGroup as shown below which had adequate permissions.

MS CRM 2011 Beta VM continued…

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:02:00 +0000

There is going to be plenty more to this VM and the CRM beta to work on as we learn more about this new release.

More Building Blocks are needed.

Using steps in the previous section make sure that the SharePoint websites are stopped. Also stop the SharePoint services below. This will dramatically speed things up.

Unpack the Beta SDK

Install the CRM 2001 SDK, using MicrosoftDynamicsCRM2011BetaSDK.exe

Double click and pick a folder to use. I chose C:\CRM2011BETASDK

Build the Plug-in Registration Tool

Open VS 2010
Open the solution in C:\CRM2011BETASDK\sdk\tools\pluginregistration

Debug the solution to make sure it works.

Enter the URL of your CRM website, and check Use Saved Credentials and click connect.

Click Connect again and you should see that the Plug-in Registration tool is working.

For testing purposes you can just run the copy out of the bin debug folder or put a copy on a folder on your desktop.

SQL Reporting Services ( Configure Data Source )

Now that CRM is installed we need to revisit Reporting services and configure the MS CRM_DataSource

Go to Reporting Services in Internet Explorer:
http://w2008r2crmdev/Reports

Click on SharedReports
Click on 5.0.xxxx
Click on Details View since the datasources are hidden by default.

Click on MSCRM_DataSource. (obviously adjust the following for your organization name and server name )

Change the Data source type to: Microsoft SQL Server
Change the Connection string to: Data Source=W2008R2CRMDEV;Initial Catalog=CRMDEMO_MSCRM;Connection Timeout=60;Integrated Security=SSPI
Click on Windows integrated security.
Click on Apply
Click on Test Connection

You should see: Connection created successfully. as shown below.

You should now be able to test out a CRM report.
I just pulled up the Account Distribution Report at the top of the list.

That wasn’t really impressive since this VM has almost no data in it, but there were no SSRS errors and that is the important part.

Creating a MS CRM 2011 VM Part 2 of 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 16:31:00 +0000

Performance Note: VirtualBox allows you to set more CPU’s for your virtual machine than you should. I ended up using 3 CPU’s for my i7 although it is a hyperthreading and shows 8 cores. I found it MUCH faster set to 3 CPU’s instead of say 4.

To speed the installation up turn off the SharePoint Websites for now. Go to IIS Manager and stop the SharePoint sites. You may want to leave this off until installing the SharePoint List component in MS CRM and you will probably only want these turned on when you are using SharePoint, otherwise they

Visual Studio 2010 Installation

VS 2010 is a very straight forward installation. It also installs a number of other prerequisites needed for MS CRM 2011 like .NET 4.0.

Mount your VS 2010 iso image and select it.

When that is complete you may want to make another snapshot of your VM.

At this point your VM’s dvi file should be about 21Gb in size.

Reporting Services Installation

Go to the Start button and click on All Programs

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 –>Configuration Tools –> Reporting Service Configuration Manager

Click Connect

Click Web Service URL then Click Apply

Click on Database and Change Database

Create a new report server database

Click Next

Click Finish

Click on Report Manager URL and click apply.

Once again this is a test VM, so I gave this my Administrator account. You probably won’t be be using connectivity to remote servers anyway.

This is good enough for the MS CRM installation to finish successfully.

MS CRM 2011 Beta Installation

Included in the download area is the file MicrosoftDynamicsCRM2011BetaIG.zip containing: MicrosoftDynamicsCRM2011BetaInstallingGuide.doc

You can refer to that document if there is anything in my instructions below that you need more information about. Page 13 starts “Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server on a server without Microsoft Dynamics CRM installed”

Start by going to you shared folder where you need to copy the CRM2011 executables that you need and copy them to the VM’s desktop. For now we just want the CRM Server and the SharePoint List component.

Create a CRM2011Beta folder on your desktop and click on the CRM2011-server-ENU-amd64.exe file and extract the contents into this folder.

Open the CRM2011Beta folder –> server –> amd64
Double click on setserver.exe

The Beta was just released so there is no point in getting any updates yet.

MS CRM Workgroup (5 CAL limit): FF2JM-QX9PG-HXT8M-MMHXG-4MF32
MS CRM Server (no CAL limit): 4FDTK-3HYV2-D9CCJ-4MF9Q-QJ32X

Next put in the appropriate key above. Notice the 270 day expiration period!

Accept the license agreement.

Install the prerequisites.

Select an installation location or keep the default.

Click Next and install all of the roles.

Type in the name of your VM Server.

Click Browse and just select the top node. Click OK and Next.

Specifying a Security Account. For a production system you will not want to do this, but for our demo system, just select Network service account. There is an additional step required for the SharePoint document management feature when doing this.

You want to create a new website to avoid any conflict with SharePoint and other sites. Keep 5555 for the port. You should have selected 9999 for the SharePoint site if you followed the instructions.

We are NOT going to set up an Email router at this time. Notice the note. This can be done later. (Setting up Exchange Server and Outlook on a test environment is worth doing especially with the new multi-tenant support in Outlook)

Pick an organization name for your system. It will name the Database automatically. Leave the rest alone.

Take the default reportserver name unless you have installed it somewhere else.

Decide if you want to take part in the use experience and click Next.

Next Installation

It may sit like this for a while. Be patient…

Getting close now. Check the box to set up the SSRS extensions, and click Finish!

Installing the SSRS Connector

If you decided not to start this when the CRM installation finished. On your desktop go to the srsdataconnector folder CRM2011Beta\server\amd64\srsdataconnector and Double click on the file SetupSrsDataConnector.exe

Click Next

Accept the license agreement

The warnings are OK for a demo, development box. Click Next.

The Moment of truth….

At this point I shut the system down. It was apparent that it was running out of memory with 4Gb RAM. So I shut it down to make a snapshot and to increase the memory to about 6Gb to see if that was usable.

It seemed much faster after the reboot. It is interesting to note that it is only using about 2.5Gb of RAM without SharePoint running.

Now turn on the SharePoint Sites again.

Create a SPList folder on your desktop. Copy the CRM2011-SharePointList-ENU-amd64.exe file from the Shared Folder areato the VM’s desktop and double click on it.

Browse to your new folder, and click OK.

Read the following inside the SPList folder for instructions to install the SP List Component.

Microsoft_Dynamics_CRM_2011_List_Component_Readme.htm

More to come. I have to do something else for a little while…

Good luck with the new Beta!

Creating a MS CRM 2011 VM Part 1 of 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:50:00 +0000

I needed both a demo box and development environment to run on Win7 64 bit computers to show customers and to write code against the MS CRM 2011 beta using the SharePoint 2010 connectivity and Visual Studio 2010 to write WP7 applications against the new WCF services in MS CRM.

The new SharePoint List Connectivity in MS CRM 2011 is a feature a number of my customers are interested in and I expect to have a lot more CRM/SharePoint integration projects coming up. Assuming this is an indication of a general interest, this would be a great time to start learning SharePoint if you haven’t already so I consider this an important piece to build into this VM.

Two points:

The world is going 64bit everywhere. There is no point trying to set up a 32bit box. It is time to just say no to 32 bit.
Virtual PC doesn’t support 64bit applications which effectively makes it useless!

Options to Host a Virtual machine in Windows 7 64 bit

Virtual Server on a W7 box as shown here (unsupported by MS)http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2009/08/windows-7-and-virtual-server.html
VMware http://www.vmware.com/
VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

I chose Virtual Box 3.2.8 based on many recommendations. It can run 64bit VHD’s and VMWare VMs but will create a VDI file and it’s a free open source solution.

VirtualBox installation in Windows 7 64bit

Stop IP Helper Service ( this will keep the VBox installation from working)
Install VirtualBox from the downloaded exe. VirtualBox-3.2.8-64453-Win.exe

What you need before beginning to build your VM:

Time: Expect at least a full day to get everything set up and that’s on a reasonably fast system. My host system ( i7 12Gb RAM running the VM image off of RAID 0 10,000rpm drives, (VM 6Gb RAM, and 4 cores)) took a full day. Plan accordingly!
Windows 2008 R2 64 bit iso image
SQL Server 2008 R2 64 bit iso image (recent copy 5/3/2010)
- Note: Older SQL iso files may require SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 and the following Hot Fix SQL Server SP1 Cumulative Update 2 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970315/
- They will give you this error message during the SharePoint Installation.
- Save yourself the trouble and download the latest SQL 2008 R2
SharePoint Server 2010 64 bit iso image
VS 2010 iso image

The current CRM 2011 beta downloads are here you will need the following:

MS CRM 2011 Server CRM2011-server-ENU-amd64.exe
CRM2011-SharePointList-ENU-amd64.exe
MicrosoftDynamicsCRM2011BetaSDK.exe

Credit where credit is due:

I am going to defer to the good work of the folks at Critical Path Training for their excellent instructions and links to video for setting up a SharePoint 2010 VM, so please visit their site http://www.criticalpathtraining.com create an account (it’s free), then go to the Members Section and download their pdf document:
“SharePoint Server 2010 RTM Virtual Machine Setup Guide”.

These instructions will walk you through setting up Windows Server 2008R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and SharePoint 2010 which is covers a good chunk of what we are installing.

Their instructions start with setting up a Hyper-V vhd which you can skip unless you are setting this up on a Microsoft Virtual Server system. You should be able to run a vhd created on a Virtual Server system on a Windows 7 64bit box using VirtualBox.

Since my intent is to create this VM on a Windows 7 64bit system here are my VirtualBox instructions.

Start VirtualBox and Click on New, click Next

Give your machine a name: W2008R2CRMDEV
Operating System: Microsoft Windows
Version: Windows 2008 (64 bit)

Give it a minimum of 4Gb of memory or more if you can spare it.

Create a new hard Disk. Click Next and Next again at the Create Virtual Disk Wizard.

Select Dynamically expanding storage

The virtual disk is only 324Mb while empty and will only use as much disk space as it needs so give it 100Gb.Click the folder button to choose where you want to store this image.

Click Next and then click Finish.
Now you will want to make a few more adjustments.

Click on System then click on the Processor tab and add some CPU’s if you can so the installation will go faster. You can always reduce the memory or CPU’s later.

Click on Display and set the video memory to 128Mb.

Click on the Shared Folders and point to an area to access files. You will need this to install the SQL Server SP1 and Hotfix and for moving files around later.

Next Click Start

Click on the Folder and Browse to your ISO image of the Windows 2008R2 DVD
You can use a DVD, but it will be much slower.

Once you have your iso images added, you can run any of them for installations, by just selecting the .iso file and clicking the Select Button.

Once you have Windows 2008 installed make sure to install the Guest additions just so that the mouse transitions better.

Devices –> Install Guest Additions

When you need to reach the CRM executables access the shared drives in Windows Explorer Network –> VBOXSVR –> \\VBOXSVR\Shared

Use the Critical Path instructions starting with the section to install Windows 2008R2 then SQL Server 2008R2 and SharePoint 2010.

Notes:

When the Farm configuration Wizard is running, it could take an hour or longer and the IE screen can time out. When the CPU finally calms down it is done. My VM was running about 100% on each CPU while this was running.
The first time you bring up your default site it may time out a couple times and then finally work.

This gives you a great starting point to install the MS CRM 2011 Beta.

Important!!!! I would highly recommend that you make a copy of your VDI file at this point! You may want to install various MS CRM 2011 release candidates and then the final RTM on this system later, or my might want to install MS CRM 4.0 on this system as well. Also Visual Studio is great for a Development system, but you may want to create a DEMO system at some point without VS installed.

MS CRM 4.0 LINQ Support in CRM SDK 4.0.12

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:48:00 +0000

So far I really like what I have seen in this new SDK release MS CRM SDK.

It solves real problems and will actually make life better for CRM developers.

The new LINQ support can be used by people customizing their own propriety CRM systems and for integrators and xRM developers with software to deploy across different CRM schemas.

How they got it right and made life easier!

The attributes can be directly accessed as simple types!

bool? instead of CrmBoolean
Guid instead of Key
etc..

The related entities are associated as a list of entities like you would expect with LINQ

IEnumerable<contact> instead of a BusinessEntityCollection.
Many less queries need to be coded greatly simplifying code.

Even though the additional queries are generated internally, they are done on the SQL side rather then requiring multiple web service calls which should be faster.

The related entity list names are predictable!

ex. acct.account_contacts
ex. acct.new_account_contact

Note: This is a significant improvement from the LINQtoSQL model that would just name related entities contacts, contacts1, contacts2 without any way to predict which related list is which and wouldn’t give you a permanent way to set naming behavior. Adding an additional relationship to an entity that was already related could ruin your existing LINQ, requiring manual editing of the model xml.

There is now much less of a reason to need to use the much more primitive Fetch type syntax. string xmlResults = crmService.Fetch(xmlQuery);
Entity classes do NOT need to be identical to the CRM schema for Selects!
Entity classes do NOT need to be identical to the CRM schema for Updates!

According to MS the Update operation sends only modified attributes back to the server so you don’t have to care about anything else that’s been added.

In a nutshell

Strong typing and compile time errors
No web reference required
Easily regenerated Entity classes

Simple Maintenance

From a command line all you have to do is use the new crmsvcutil.exe to generate and update the LINQ Entity class source files. More information here. MSDN reference

C:\> crmsvcutil /server:http://crm/Contoso /out:MyLinqEntities

One of the reasons I really appreciate this is that I wrote a utility to read all of the MS CRM Metadata and generate (Data Transfer Objects) or DTO’s for RIA services about a year ago along with all of the associated attributes for validation. Idea for MS: If we had a switch on this utility to dynamically generate validation criteria attributes from the MS CRM metadata so that we could bind a control to it, that would be great for MVVM Silverlight apps! Or generate them by default and just comment them out.

Getting Started:

David Yack has an explanation of how to set up MS CRM LINQ on your system and use it in a hello world project. There is no point duplicating his effort.

Sample Solution:

The following is a very simple sample solution 7.5Mb that is little more than the sample in the explanation link above. However the SDK libraries are included in the solution as are the Entity class files generated from the stock MS CRM 4.0 Contoso VM with a couple additions to the Account entity.

Since it ONLY accesses a couple standard fields in the Account entity it should work out of the box on any CRM 4 box once the Server name is set in the app.config file. Just change the line below to whatever your local server name/orgname is and it should work.

Server=http://crm/Contoso;"/>

This is good stuff and the sooner you start using this the more time it will save you!

MS CRM 4.0 Sending Attachments to the Browser

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:01:00 +0000

In a previous blog article I covered how to take files and make them attachments to emails. Creating Attachments to emails and annotations

Recently I’ve been spending more time building portals to MS CRM, and have needed to make attached files available to the user by browser.

From a custom web app running with MS CRM you can always create a link like the following that will call the annotation editor screen which will let you download the attachment or delete it or add an additional attachment to the annotation.

string link = String.Format(@"{0}{1}/notes/edit.aspx?id={2}", crmServerBaseUrl, orgname, thisNote.annotationid.Value);

However sometimes when working with an external application you don’t have the ability to call the MS CRM functionality or for aesthetic reasons you want things to look differently. In this case I have a Silverlight 3 application with a completely different look and feel and I just need to retrieve annotation attachments from a list associated with an entity or contact. The ExportFile() method below would work just as well with an activitymimeattachment for email attachments.

The following aspx file simply takes an annotationid querystring, retrieves that annotation ( you provide the query) and sends the attached file to the user’s browser. The user will then be able to download the file or open the file in an appropriate application.

using System;
using System.Web;
using Passport.Web.Services.Logic;

namespace YourProject
{
    public partial class SendAnnotation : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {           
            if (Request.QueryString["id"] != null)
            {                
                Guid annotationId = new Guid(Request.QueryString["id"].Replace("{", "").Replace("}", ""));

                // Get annotation
                annotation fileContainer = // fill in the query logic you need here.
                
                // Call method to write
                ExportFile(fileContainer.filename, fileContainer.documentbody, fileContainer.mimetype);             
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// This method takes the annotation documentbody and writes it back to the browser
        /// with a file name and mimetype so that your browser knows how to intelligently 
        /// handle the file being sent to it.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="fileName"></param>
        /// <param name="content"></param>
        /// <param name="type"></param>
        private void ExportFile(string fileName, string content, string type)
        {
            byte[] fileContent = Convert.FromBase64String(content);
            Response.ClearContent();
            Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + fileName);
            Response.ContentType = type;
            Response.BinaryWrite(fileContent);
            Response.End();
        }
        
    }

}

MS CRM 4.0, xRM and building blocks

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:46:00 +0000

I have spent a number of years working with MS CRM as the end solution while integrating it with many other systems to make it the center of an organization’s business processes, data tracking and communication.

Change is good.

My emphasis has changed over the last year from business analysis, configuration, integration and customization of MS CRM to xRM systems that use MS CRM as a framework to build non-CRM solutions, and now leveraging MS CRM and xRM systems as a part of larger solutions.

My change in direction has also made me seriously think about what can be data driven and abstracted away to allow much more powerful solutions. I’m looking at MS CRM’s metadata in a completely new way these days as I integrate MS CRM with EF, RIA services and Silverlight 3. Taking a page from MS CRM’s form designer I’m now building Silverlight XAML based on metadata.

I’m also working on creating a developer level product out of my MS CRM import framework. (Think Scribe but for developers with complete control over everything for one time data migrations and for scheduled synchronizations.)

Enamored with MS

A real credit to the MS CRM framework is that I’m always looking at the holes in other technologies compared to what MS CRM allows as a development framework. It seems like they are all playing a game of catch up.

As a person who loves finding interesting ways to bend and mold MS CRM to do amazing things for businesses, I think the latest developments in EF, RIA and SL3 are really exciting. MS is really giving us great building blocks to create better and more powerful solutions that really improve the user experience. MS should be blushing right now and waiting for me to pucker up and give them a kiss.

Didn’t always feel this way

Now don’t get me wrong. I didn’t drink the MS Kool-Aid early in my career. I was focused around UNIX technologies for over a decade, QNX (digital Mastering console with proprietary parallel processing backplane), SCO UNIX (tracking nuclear waste shipments by satellite) and (Continuous Emissions Monitoring systems), Interactive, AIX ( Medical Systems ). I also touched HP/UX, IRIX, Coherent and Linux to a lesser extent.

At one point all serious work was done in UNIX, period. Now that am creating business solutions, I really can’t see any competitors to the business infrastructure and products that MS has and is developing. MS has so many technologies that really deliver and connect together easily that I rarely feel like I can’t create a solution to any problem. Maybe I’m just having some really good development days lately, but it just seems like a lot of new technologies are really evolving well.

So how does this impact my blog?

I’m still working with all of the MS CRM API’s, but have noticed that a lot of things are so second nature that I don’t even think about them any more. The result is that I have less urges to write a blog articles. I continue to read and answer questions in the newsgroup microsoft.public.crm.developer which is sometimes a source of inspiration for blog articles, and I expect to add some content soon on using the MS CRM metadata web service, so time will tell.

I’m also considering creating a secondary blog dealing with the fun of global development, virtual dev teams, finding talent, maximizing personal productivity, tools and lessons learned.

Of course the trick is keeping balance in my life while doing this. I’ve been very fortunate that I continue to be found by some great customers who have been fun to work with and have very interesting and challenging work. I am even more fortunate to have a great wife who pulls me away from the computer to play ( cycling, mountain biking, hiking, etc.. ).

Looking forward to the road ahead!

RFC822 Import to MS CRM email activity utility

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:24:00 +0000

When migrating from Goldmine and some other CRM systems to MS CRM there is sometimes a need to import historical email. This is frequently stored in a SQL database in rfc822 format. RFC822 is an email format standard.

What I am providing is a single class along with a file from the MS CRM SDK that this class currently uses. This single class is consolidated from a number of other classes in my import framework and is intended to give you a nearly complete rfc822 import solution that you can modify for your needs. Every place that you need to make a modification according to your particular system has a //TODO: comment explaining what you need to adjust particular to your configuration. In addition assume that there will be some tweaking required, and make sure to do thorough debugging and testing to verify that your email records are being properly generated.

You can download the source code here.

There are 2 steps to using this class.

Part 1: Initialize a new RFC822ToEmailActivity object.

var emailConversion = new RFC822ToEmailActivity("Contoso"); // Your Orgname

Part 2: Calling the CreateEmailFromRfc822Record() method

CreateEmailFromRfc822Record() should be called in your loop that is reading the rfc822 records

var emailEntity = emailConversion.CreateEmailFromRfc822Record(     rfc822Record, // This is the string holding the whole 822 record     localEmailDomainName, // This is the local email domain name ex. onecrmpro.com      emailOwnerId, // systemUserId of email entity owner     relatedEntityName, // contact or account or....     relatedEntityId // id of the entity to regard the email to
)

Calls parsing method
Creates email attachments from pathnames returned from parsing method.
Writes to an error log file with all attachments that are not found and other errors.
Makes any other changes to the email entity before saving it.
Sets Email State as completed (sent or received) based on local domain name.

Called Internally: ParseRFC822() parsing and email activity creation.

Parse an rfc822 record
Create an email activity based on that record.
Compare email addresses, both To: and From: with a local domain name to decide if the email is incoming or outgoing.
Create ActivityParties for To:, CC:, BCC:, From: related to CRM users, Contacts, Accounts and Leads in that match order precedence.
Return a list of pathnames to any attachments.

RFC882 Email Attachments

Products like Gold Mine are storing email bodies in the database but they only have pathnames to the attachments. These attachment paths are frequently on the end user’s local computer which can be unreliable. These attachments may have been renamed, moved or deleted.

Hint1: Create a single shared folder on a file server with a separate tree branch for each computer that has attached files in the email history and modify the pathnames programmatically to match the structure you create on the file server.

Example:
S:\importattachments\C\Documents and Settings\mkovalcson\My Documents

Hint2: Comment out or create a test mode where nothing is written into the CRM database, but missing attachments are still written to a log file where you can see what isn’t found and decide how important it is to hunt attachments down before the final import.

You may want to look at this before you get started.
MS CRM Data Import (Cleaning up the Mess)

MS CRM 4.0 Entity Mapping and Hidden Mappings

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:41:00 +0000

Microsoft has a powerful way to manage automatic attribute mappings from entities created from other entities. Typically we see this in the QOI process where an Opportunity is created, and then a Quote, Order or Invoice can be created from the Opportunity and much of the information is automatically copied from the Opportunity to that Quote, Order or Invoice.

Entity Mapping

If you open up your Opportunity from Customize Entities and look at 1:N Relationships, you can see the opportunity_quotes relationship.

If you double click on that you will see mappings. This shows you the names of each source opportunity attribute that is “Mapped” to a target quote attribute when a Quote is created from an opportunity.

This is very useful if you want to add custom fields and have those automatically propagated too or if you want to disable any default mappings.

So what about mapping the opportunityproduct? or quotedetail, salesorderdetail, and invoicedetail for that matter?

Hidden Entity Mapping

Step 1. You need the EntityMapId for the relationship that you want to map.

You can manually scan the EntityMapBase table matching against the SourceEntityName and TargetEntityName.

Or you can write a select like the one below to get a nice list of Guids to copy and paste into a temporary form.

Select TargetEntityName, EntityMapId from dbo.EntityMapBase
where SourceEntityName = 'opportunityproduct'

Step 2. Take the following URL and replace your server name and the EntityMapId of your choice to gain access to the rest of the mappingList editors.

http://localhost:5555/Tools/SystemCustomization/Relationships/Mappings/mappingList.aspx?mappingId=3A116CD4-A5EE-DD11-BDF0-0003FFEB167C

CRM Demos, SSD Drives and Virtual Machines

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Kovalcson) — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:38:00 +0000

When doing a demo you never want the software to look slow, and when doing CRM development against virtual machines performance is always critical to being efficient.

The Hardware
Samsung recently released their new 256Gb SSD drive and for me this drive signals that SSD drives have become mature. Intel has had very fast SSD drives available, but they were not very large. Like most other SSD drives they suffered from a condition where over time the drive would drop dramatically in performance. Samsung’s new drive has algorithms to minimize this to the point of it being of it being much less noticeable while still performing very similarly to the Intel SSD’s in access time and throughput.

So hoping that this drive lived up to my expectations, I replaced my laptop’s 7200 rpm 160Gb drive with Samsung’s new 256Gb SSD drive. My main concern was that running my VM’s off the system drive would still be unacceptable.

Virtual Machines
Before: I have run my vhd files from separate Firewire 800 Raid 0 drives. Keeping the system drive separate from the VHD was critical to getting good virtual machine performance.

After: The MS CRM 4.0 VHD 2009 now loads up in a mere 14 seconds while still running on the system drive versus 52 seconds on my external Firewire 800 drive. VS 2008 loads up after a clean boot(nothing cached) in 17 seconds and closes in 2 seconds compared with 57 and 13 seconds on my old drive.

Developing against a VM while on battery
This allows real development work to be done while running on battery power. The new SSD drive uses less power than the original drive did, and lugging around external drives for demos is now unnecessary.

As I write this the new Samsung drive is currently available at Dell as part 341-9999 for $699.99. For this you get 256Gb at the speed of a 10,000 rpm RAID system that fits in a laptop while sipping at your batteries. In some ways, especially average access time, it actually blows an expensive and bulky RAID system away.

Even MORE Speed Possible
I’ve seen reports twin drive laptops getting transfer rates of 300 MB/sec with two of these Samsung drives in a RAID 0 configuration. For comparison a single Samsung drive has a transfer rate of 200MB/sec which is still a lot faster than the 60Mb/sec of a 7200rpm internal laptop drive my less than a year old laptop was using.

The Installation
The replacement was easy. I used my Acronis backup software to make a complete disk backup to one of my external RAID drives. For my Dell M6300 I had to remove 4 screws, pull the drive out. Remove two more screws for the surrounding case. Screw the new drive into the case, slide it into the computer and put the 4 attaching screws back in. Boot from the Acronis CD. It recognizes all of my external drives USB and Firewire. Use the Acronis software to “add a drive” and partition it. Then restore the backup, remove the CD and reboot. The backup and restore(much faster) took me about 2.5 hours. Everything else took about 15 minutes.