Importing/Exporting Subject Records between Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Environments

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After going through a few separate development cycles involving Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365CE), you begin to get a good grasp of the type of tasks that need to be followed through each time. Most of these are what you may expect – such as importing an unmanaged/managed solution into a production environment – but others can differ depending on the type of deployment. What ultimately emerges as part of this is the understanding that there are certain configuration settings and records that are not included as part of a Solution file and which must be migrated across to different environments in an alternate manner.

The application has many record types that fit under this category, such as Product or Product Price List. When it comes to migrating these record types into a Production environment, those out there who are strictly familiar with working inside the application only may choose to utilise the Advanced Find facility in the following manner:

  • Generate a query to return all of the records that require migration, ensuring all required fields are returned.
  • Export out the records into an Excel Spreadsheet
  • Import the above spreadsheet into your target environment via the Data Import wizard.

And there would be nothing wrong with doing things this way, particularly if your skillset sits more within a functional, as opposed to technical, standpoint. Where you may come unstuck with this approach is if you have a requirement to migrate Subject record types across environments. Whilst a sensible (albeit time-consuming) approach to this requirement could be to simply create them from scratch in your target environment, you may fall foul of this method if you are utilising Workflows or Business Rules that reference Subject values. When this occurs, the application looks for the underlying Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) of the Subject record, as opposed to the Display Name. If a record with this exact GUID value does not exist within your target environment, then your processes will error and fail to activate. Taking this into account, should you then choose to follow the sequence of tasks above involving Advanced Find, your immediate stumbling block will become apparent, as highlighted below:

As you can see, there is no option to select the Subject entity for querying, compounding any attempts to get them exported out of the application. Fortunately, there is a way to get overcome this via the Configuration Migration tool. This has traditionally been bundled together as part of the applications Solution Developer Kit (SDK). The latest version of the SDK for 8.2 of the application can be downloaded from Microsoft directly, but newer versions – to your delight or chagrin – are only available via NuGet. For those who are unfamiliar with using this, you can download version 9.0.2.3 of the Configuration Migration tool alone using the link below:

Microsoft.CrmSdk.XrmTooling.ConfigurationMigration.Wpf.9.0.2.3

With everything downloaded and ready to go, the steps involved in migrating Subject records between different D365CE environments are as follows:

  1. The first step before any export can take place is to define a Schema – basically, a description of the record types and fields you wish to export. Once defined, schemas can be re-used for future export/import jobs, so it is definitely worth spending some time defining all of the record types that will require migration between environments. Select Create schema on the CRM Configuration Migration screen and press Continue.

  1. Login to D365CE using the credentials and details for your specific environment.

  1. After logging in and reading your environment metadata, you then have the option of selecting the Solution and Entities to export. A useful aspect to all of this is that you have the ability to define which entity fields you want to utilise with the schema and you can accommodate multiple Entities within the profile. For this example, we only want to export out the Subject entity, so select the Default Solution, the entity in question and hit the Add Entity > button. Your window should resemble the below if done correctly:

  1. With the schema fully defined, you can now save the configuration onto your local PC. After successfully exporting the profile, you will be asked whether you wish to export the data from the instance you are connected to. Hit Yes to proceed.

  1. At this point, all you need to do is define the Save to data file location, which is where a .zip file containing all exported record data will be saved. Once decided, press the Export Data button. This can take some time depending on the number of records being processed. The window should update to resemble the below once the export has successfully completed. Select the Exit button when you are finished to return to the home screen.

  1. You have two options at this stage – either you can either exit the application entirely or, if you have your target import environment ready, select the Import data and Continue buttons, signing in as required.

  1. All that remains is to select the .zip file created in step 5), press the Import Data button, sit back and confirm that all record data imports successfully.

It’s worth noting that this import process works similarly to how the in-application Import Wizard operates with regards to record conflicts; namely, if a record with the same GUID value exists in the target instance, then the above import will overwrite the record data accordingly. This can be helpful, as it means that changes to records such as the Subject entity can be completed safely within a development context and promoted accordingly to new environments.

The Configuration Migration tool is incredibly handy to have available but is perhaps not one that it is shouted from the rooftops that often. It’s usefulness not just extends to the Subject entity, but also when working with the other entity types discussed at the start of this post. Granted, if you do not find yourself working much with Processes that reference these so-called “configuration” records, then introducing the above step as part of any release management process could prove to be an unnecessary administrative burden. Regardless, there is at least some merit to factor in the above tool as part of an initial release of a D365CE solution to ensure that all development-side configuration is quickly and easily moved across to your production environment.

Override the Modified On Field Value When Reassigning Resolved Cases (Dynamics 365 for Customer Service)

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Typically, when working with Dynamics 365 for Customer Service entities, you expect a certain type of behaviour. A good example of this in practice is entity record activation and the differences between Active and Inactive record types. In simple terms, you are generally restricted in the actions that can be performed against an Inactive record, most commonly being the modification of a field value. You can, however, perform actions such as deleting and reassigning records to other users in the application. The latter of these can be particularly useful if, for example, an individual leaves a business and you need to ensure that another employee requires access to old, inactive records.

When it comes to reporting on time intervals for when a record was last changed, I often – rightly or wrongly – see the Modified On field used for this purpose. This, essentially, stores the date and time of when the record was…well…last modified in the system! Since only more recent changes to the application have facilitated an alternative approach in reporting a record’s age and its current stage within a process, it is perhaps understandable why this field is often chosen when attempting to report, for example, the date on which a record was moved to Inactive status. Where you may encounter issues with this is if you a working in a similar situation highlighted above – namely, an individual leaving a business – and you need to reassign all of the inactive records owned by them. Doing either of these steps will immediately update the Modified On value to the current date and time, skewering any dependent reporting.

Fortunately, there is a way of getting around this, if you don’t have any qualms about opening up Visual Studio and putting together a plug-in in C#. Via this route, you can prevent the Modified On value of a record from being updated by capturing the original value and forcing the platform to commit this value to the database during the Pre-Operation stage of the transaction, as opposed to the date and time of when the record is reassigned. In fact, using this method, you can set the Modified On value to be whatever you want. Here’s the code that illustrates how to achieve both scenarios:

using System;

using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;

namespace Sample.OverrideCaseModifiedDate
{
    public class PreOpCaseAssignOverrideModifiedDate : IPlugin
    {
        public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
        {
            //Obtain the execution context from the service provider.

            IPluginExecutionContext context = (IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));

            //Extract the tracing service for use in debugging sandboxed plug-ins

            ITracingService tracingService = (ITracingService)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(ITracingService));

            tracingService.Trace("Tracing implemented successfully!");

            if (context.InputParameters.Contains("Target") && context.InputParameters["Target"] is Entity)

            {
                Entity incident = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];
                Entity preIncident = context.PreEntityImages["preincident"];

                //At this stage, you can either get the previous Modified On date value via the Pre Entity Image and set the value accordingly...

                incident["modifiedon"] = preIncident.GetAttributeValue<DateTime>("modifiedon");

                //Or alternatively, set it to whatever you want - in this example, we get the Pre Entity Image createdon value, add on an hour and then set the value

                DateTime createdOn = preIncident.GetAttributeValue<DateTime>("createdon");
                TimeSpan time = new TimeSpan(1, 0, 0);
                DateTime newModifiedOn = createdOn.Add(time);
                incident["modifiedon"] = newModifiedOn;

            }
        }
    }
}

When deploying out your plug-in code to the application (something that I hope regular readers of the blog will be familiar with), make sure that the settings you configure for your Step and the all-important Entity image resemble the images below:

Now, the more eagle-eyed readers may notice that the step is configured on the Update as opposed to the Assign message, which is what you (and, indeed, I when I first started out with this) may expect. Unfortunately, because the Input Parameters of the Assign message only returns two Entity Reference objects – the incident (Case) and systemuser (User) entities, respectively – as opposed to an Entity object for the incident entity, we have no means of interfering with the underlying database transaction to override the required field values. The Update message does not suffer from this issue and, by scoping the plug-in’s execution to the ownerid field only, we can ensure that it will only ever trigger when a record is reassigned.

With the above plug-in configured, you have the flexibility of re-assigning your Case records without updating the Modified On field value in the process or expanding this further to suit whatever business requirement is needed. In theory, as well, the approach used in this example could also be applied to other what we may term “system defined fields”, such as the Created On field. Hopefully, this post may prove some assistance if you find yourself having to tinker around with inactive Case records in the future.

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Deep Dive: Creating a Basic Custom Workflow Assembly

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This is an accompanying blog post to my YouTube video Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Deep Dive: Creating a Basic Custom Workflow Assembly. The video is part of my tutorial series on how to accomplish developer focused tasks within Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. You can watch the video in full below:

Below you will find links to access some of the resources discussed as part of the video and to further reading topics:

PowerPoint Presentation (click here to download)

Full Code Sample

using System;
using System.Activities;

using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Workflow;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Query;

namespace D365.SampleCWA
{
    public class CWA_CopyQuote : CodeActivity
    {
        protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context)
        {
            IWorkflowContext c = context.GetExtension<IWorkflowContext>();

            IOrganizationServiceFactory serviceFactory = context.GetExtension<IOrganizationServiceFactory>();
            IOrganizationService service = serviceFactory.CreateOrganizationService(c.UserId);

            ITracingService tracing = context.GetExtension<ITracingService>();

            tracing.Trace("Tracing implemented successfully!", new Object());

            Guid quoteID = c.PrimaryEntityId;

            Entity quote = service.Retrieve("quote", quoteID, new ColumnSet("freightamount", "discountamount", "discountpercentage", "name", "pricelevelid", "customerid", "description"));

            quote.Id = Guid.Empty;
            quote.Attributes.Remove("quoteid");

            quote.Attributes["name"] = "Copy of " + quote.GetAttributeValue<string>("name");
            Guid newQuoteID = service.Create(quote);

            EntityCollection quoteProducts = RetrieveRelatedQuoteProducts(service, quoteID);
            EntityCollection notes = RetrieveRelatedNotes(service, quoteID);

            tracing.Trace(quoteProducts.TotalRecordCount.ToString() + " Quote Product records returned.", new Object());

            foreach (Entity product in quoteProducts.Entities)
            {
                product.Id = Guid.Empty;
                product.Attributes.Remove("quotedetailid");
                product.Attributes["quoteid"] = new EntityReference("quote", newQuoteID);
                service.Create(product);
            }
            foreach (Entity note in notes.Entities)
            {
                note.Id = Guid.Empty;
                note.Attributes.Remove("annotationid");
                note.Attributes["objectid"] = new EntityReference("quote", newQuoteID);
                service.Create(note);
            }
        }

        [Input("Quote Record to Copy")]
        [ReferenceTarget("quote")]

        public InArgument<EntityReference> QuoteReference { get; set; }
        private static EntityCollection RetrieveRelatedQuoteProducts(IOrganizationService service, Guid quoteID)
        {
            QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression("quotedetail");
            query.ColumnSet.AllColumns = true;
            query.Criteria.AddCondition("quoteid", ConditionOperator.Equal, quoteID);
            query.PageInfo.ReturnTotalRecordCount = true;

            return service.RetrieveMultiple(query);
        }
        private static EntityCollection RetrieveRelatedNotes(IOrganizationService service, Guid objectID)
        {
            QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression("annotation");
            query.ColumnSet.AllColumns = true;
            query.Criteria.AddCondition("objectid", ConditionOperator.Equal, objectID);
            query.PageInfo.ReturnTotalRecordCount = true;

            return service.RetrieveMultiple(query);
        }
    }
}

Download/Resource Links

Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition

Setup a free 30 day trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

C# Guide (Microsoft Docs)

Source Code Management Solutions

Further Reading

Microsoft Docs – Create a custom workflow activity

MSDN – Register and use a custom workflow activity assembly

MSDN – Update a custom workflow activity using assembly versioning (This topic wasn’t covered as part of the video, but I would recommend reading this article if you are developing an ISV solution involving custom workflow assemblies)

MSDN – Sample: Create a custom workflow activity

You can also check out some of my previous blog posts relating to Workflows:

  • Implementing Tracing in your CRM Plug-ins – We saw as part of the video how to utilise tracing, but this post goes into more detail about the subject, as well as providing instructions on how to enable the feature within the application (in case you are wondering why nothing is being written to the trace log 🙂 ). All code examples are for Plug-ins, but they can easily be repurposed to work with a custom workflow assembly instead.
  • Obtaining the User who executed a Workflow in Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (C# Workflow Activity) – You may have a requirement to trigger certain actions within the application, based on the user who executed a Workflow. This post walks through how to achieve this utilising a custom workflow assembly.

If you have found the above video useful and are itching to learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement development, then be sure to take a look at my previous videos/blog posts using the links below:

Have a question or an issue when working through the code samples? Be sure to leave a comment below or contact me directly, and I will do my best to help. Thanks for reading and watching!

Top 10 Most Viewed CRM Chap Blog Posts

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Slight change of pace with this week’s blog post, which will be a fairly condensed and self-indulgent affair – due to personal circumstances, I have been waylaid somewhat when it comes to producing content for the blog and I have also been unable to make any further progress with my new YouTube video series. Hoping that normal service will resume shortly, meaning additional videos and more content-rich blog posts, so stay tuned.

I’ve been running the CRM Chap blog for just over 2 years now. Over this time, I have been humbled and proud to have received numerous visitors to the site, some of whom have been kind enough to provide feedback or to share some of their Dynamics CRM/365 predicaments with me. Having reached such a landmark now seems to be good a time as any to take a look back on the posts that have received the most attention and to, potentially, give those who missed them the opportunity to read them. In descending order, here is the list of the most viewed posts to date on the crmchap.co.uk website:

  1. Utilising SQL Server Stored Procedures with Power BI
  2. Installing Dynamics CRM 2016 SP1 On-Premise
  3. Power BI Deep Dive: Using the Web API to Query Dynamics CRM/365 for Enterprise
  4. Utilising Pre/Post Entity Images in a Dynamics CRM Plugin
  5. Modifying System/Custom Views FetchXML Query in Dynamics CRM
  6. Grant Send on Behalf Permissions for Shared Mailbox (Exchange Online)
  7. Getting Started with Portal Theming (ADXStudio/CRM Portals)
  8. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Data Export Service Review
  9. What’s New in the Dynamics 365 Developer Toolkit
  10. Implementing Tracing in your CRM Plug-ins

I suppose it is a testament to the blog’s stated purpose that posts covering areas not exclusive to Dynamics CRM/365 rank so highly on the list and, indeed, represents how this application is so deeply intertwined with other technology areas within the Microsoft “stack”.

To all new and long-standing followers of the blog, thank you for your continued support and appreciation for the content 🙂

System.AggregateException: One or more errors occured (Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plug-in)

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As part of developing Dynamics CRM/Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM/D365CE) plug-ins day in, day out, you can often forget about the Execution Mode setting. This can be evidenced by the fact that I make no mention of it in my recent tutorial video on plug-in development. In a nutshell, this setting enables you to customise whether your plug-in executes in Synchronous or Asynchronous mode. Now, you may be asking – just what the hell does that mean?!? The best way of understanding is by rephrasing the terminology; it basically tells the system when you want your code to be executed. Synchronous plug-ins execute all of your business logic whilst the record is being saved by the user, with this action not being considered complete and committed to the backend database until the plug-in completes. By comparison, Asynchronous plug-ins are queued for execution after the record has been saved. A System Job record is created and queued alongside other jobs in the system via the Asynchronous Service. Another way of remembering the difference between each one is to think back to the options available to you as part of a Workflow. They can either be executed in real time (synchronously) or in the background (asynchronously). Plug-ins are no different and give you the flexibility to ensure your business logic is applied immediately or, if especially complex, queued so that the system has sufficient time to process in the background.

I came across a strange issue with an arguably even stranger Synchronous plug-in the other day, which started failing after taking an inordinately long time saving the record:

Unexpected exception from plug-in (Execute): MyPlugin.MyPluginClass: System.AggregateException: One or more errors occurred.

The “strange” plug-in was designed so that, on the Create action of an Entity record, it goes out and creates various related records within the application, based on a set of conditions. We originally had issues with the plug-in a few months back erroring, due to the execution time exceeding the 2 minute limit for sandbox plug-ins. A rather ingenious and much more accomplished developer colleague got around the issue by implementing a degree of asynchronous processing within the plug-in, achieved like so:

await Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
    lock (service)
    {
        Stopwatch stopwatch = Stopwatch.StartNew();
        Guid record = service.Create(newRecord);
        tracing.Trace("Record with ID " + record.ToString() + " created successfully after: {0}ms.", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
    }
});

I still don’t fully understand just exactly what this is doing, but I put this down to my novice level C# knowledge 🙂 The important thing was that the code worked…until some additional processing was added to the plug-in, leading to the error message above.

At this juncture, our only choice was to look at forcing the plug-in to execute in Asynchronous mode by modifying the appropriate setting on the plug-in step within the Plugin Registration Tool:

After making this change and attempting to create the record again in the application, everything worked as expected. However, this did create a new problem for us to overcome – end users of the application were previously used to seeing the related records created by the plug-in within sub-grids on the Primary Entity form, which would then be accessed and worked through accordingly. As the very act of creating these records now took place within the background and took some time to complete, we needed to display an informative message to the user to advise them to refresh the form after a few minutes. You do have the ability within plug-ins to display a custom message back to the user, but this is only in situations where you are throwing an error message and it didn’t seem to be a particularly nice solution for this scenario.

In the end, the best way of achieving this requirement was to implement a JScript function on the form. This would trigger whenever the form is saved and displays a message box that the user has to click OK on before the save action is carried out:

function displaySaveMessage(context) {

    var eventArgs = context.getEventArgs();
    var saveMode = eventArgs.getSaveMode();

    if (saveMode == 70 || saveMode == 2 || saveMode == 1 || saveMode == 59) {
        var message = "Records will be populated in the background and you will need to refresh the form after a few minutes to see them on the Sub-Grid. Press OK to save the record."
        Xrm.Utility.alertDialog(message, function () {
            Xrm.Page.data.save().then(function () {
                Xrm.Page.data.refresh();
            })
        });
    }
}

By feeding through the execution context parameter, you are able to determine the type of save action that the alert will trigger on; in this case, Save, Save & Close, Save & New and Autosave. Just make sure you configure your script with the correct properties on the form, which are:

  • Using the OnSave event handler
  • With the Pass execution context as first parameter setting enabled

From the end-users perspective, they will see something similar to the below when the record is saved:

It’s a pity that we don’t have similar kind of functionality exposed via Business Rules that enable us to display OnSave alerts that are more in keeping with the applications look and feel. Nevertheless, the versatility of utilising JScript functions should be evident here and can often achieve these types of bespoke actions with a few lines of code.

When it comes to plug-in development, understanding the impact and processing time that your code has within the application is important for two reasons – first, in ensuring that end users are not frustrated by long loading times and, secondly, in informing the choice of Execution Mode when it comes to deploying out a plug-in. Whilst Asynchronous plug-ins can help to mitigate any user woes and present a natural choice when working with bulk operations within the application, make sure you fully understand the impact that these have on the Asynchronous Service and avoid a scenario where the System Job entity is queued with more jobs then it can handle.