Complex Queries in Crm 4

Hi All,

I am not normally a big fan of FetchXml. It is messy and since it is often passed in as a string, it can be prone to syntax errors. But over the years, people have been using Fiddler to extract the SOAP headers to the Crm server in order to catch the FetchXml query. There is nothing new here and it is quite handy if you accept the fact that data will also be returned in xml format, meaning it will have to be iterated to get the needed information. Which can really be a pain. I have spent time writing methods to parse the result xml into a dictionary that I can easily access. But even this can be painful at times.

So the other day I discovered a class called FetchXmlToQueryExpressionRequest. This class can be used to convert any fetchXml to a QueryBase object, that can be fed into a RetrieveMultipleRequest. The beauty of this lies in the fact that it is the best of both worlds. You can use advanced find to build complex queries without having to confuse yourself with linked entities etc AND you can then retrieve the data as a BusinessEntityCollection.

Here's some sample code:

string fetch = @"
<fetch version='1.0' output-format='xml-platform' mapping='logical' distinct='false'>
<entity name='contact'>
<attribute name='mobilephone'/>
<attribute name='lastname'/>
<attribute name='firstname'/>
<attribute name='emailaddress1'/>
<attribute name='contactid'/>
<order attribute='lastname' descending='false'/>
</entity>
</fetch>";";

FetchXmlToQueryExpressionRequest fetchReq = new FetchXmlToQueryExpressionRequest();

FetchReq.FetchXml = fetch;

FetchXmlToQueryExpressionResponse res = (FetchXmlToQueryExpressionResponse)service.Execute(fetchReq);

RetrieveMultipleRequest req = new RetrieveMultipleRequest();

req.Query = res.Query;

req.ReturnDynamicEntities = true;

RetrieveMultipleResponse recordSet = (RetrieveMultipleResponse)service.Execute(req);

Have a nice day
Paul Reyneke

The specified organization is disabled

I ran into a little problem on my development server today. I was playing round with a windows service that I wrote to run timed events. At one point the Windows service ran into an infinite loop and "End Task" wouldn't kill it, so the only way I could break out of it was to restart ISS. All of a sudden the windows service would no longer start. After a while I tried to log into the crm incarnation of the organization I'm working on and I kept on getting a "The specified organization is disabled" error. This made me panick a bit because I thought I'd corrupted the DB. After more time trying to figure it out, I also tried each of the other organizations (there are 10+ of these) on the crm server and they all had the same problem, "The specified organization is disabled".

Googling the problem kept on coming back to an issue with disabling the default organization form within Deployment Manager. But since I had not done this, I just ignored it's advice and kept on trying to find BD corruption. But after a while I had a look at Deployment manager, and sure enough, the default organization was disabled. This puzzled me a bit, until I remembered that I did infact disable it weeks ago. So I had a look at this link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946618/enus$

It was clear that, by pure bad luck, I had not restarted IIS since the default organization got disabled, which was weeks ago. So, re-enabled the default organization, restarted IIS and everything was working again. But 4 hours was wasted on this problem.

Moral of the story, the most obvious cause/solution is often the most likely.

Plugin throws "The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized" error

Right, I ran into this a while ago but completely forgot about it until now. After digging around a bit I found that there wasn't much documentation on this outside of the forums. So here goes:

This error occurs the first time the CrmService (or ICrmService) is envolked using a command like "Execute" or "Retrieve". What is meant to happen is that the service should connect to Crm based on it's "Unique Name", but a bug forces it to use the "Fieldly Name" instead. So consider this. You created a new organization on your Crm server called "My Crm Server", this is the friendly name, the Deployment Manager then auto-creates a unique name based on this, but without the spaces "MyCrmServer". Note that you can overwrite the unique name to make it anything else, so long as it doesn't contain non alphanumerics.

It seems to the end user that the organization got created without any problems and everything goes fine.

You write your first plug-in for the organization and deploy it. Your surprised to receive the "The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized" error and cannot find the cause of this error. Then, after you do a lot of debugging, you realize that it is in fact a Crm bug and not a bug in your code.

To fix this, there are one of two options.

The Workaround
1. From the deployment manager, disable the organisation and rename the friendly name to be identical to the unique name and then re-enable the org.

The Patch
2. Install the patch: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948746

Hopefully this helps those who, like me, struggled hours to figure this out.

Thanks
Bossie

Field level security in Crm

There are no supported way to enforce field level security in Crm. What is often done is that the field or tab is hidden on the form. This has a number of weaknesses.

• Firstly, when you print the form, all the hidden fields will be printed out too. Now you can simply hide the print button too, but this can be overcome in the same way as the next bullet point.
• Any user with a little bit of javascript knowledge could easily unhide these fields by using a tool such as the IE Dev Toolbar

The second option is to create a child entity that hangs off the entity that the sensitive fields live on and then to move these sensitive fields to this new entity. This will allow you to use the Crm out of the box security on this child entity. This will work fine, but it does mean that each record you create, you'll have to also create a child record, which can be a pain.

The final, and most complicated, way is to do a combination of both the above. Now this is a little hard to explain, so bear with me. Note that for this part I do assume that the user has a reasonable grasp on writing plugins and javascript as well as knowledge of how to do a webservice call to the crmService via javascript.

For this example, I will use the account entity, and assume a new bankaccount field is the sensitive field.

I create the bankaccount field on the account form and show and hide it based on whether the user is in the "Manager" security role (note that determining the security role of a user is covered by other blogs and out of scope for this entry, if anyone needs more information, email me).

Next I create a new entity called bankaccount, and create a 1:N relationship with account. This entity only has one field, "bankaccount". Assign security to this entity so that only users in the "Manager" security role can use it (read, write, create etc) and no one else can see it.

Now, onCreate of an entity, if the bankaccount field is filled in I create a bankaccount record that hangs off the account entity. Also in this plugin I clear the value of the bankaccount field on the account form, so it is essencially empty. Note that you may even put something like "bank account hidden" as the bankaccount in in the plugin.

So now when a user opens this new account and does not have rights to see the bankaccount details, the field is both hidden and empty, so even if they do try and unhide it, it won't show the correct value.

Finally, if a user has rights to see the bank acount, use a crm soap call (also covered on blogs elsewhere, and is similar to retrieving the user role, email me if you need more info) to retrieve the bankaccount from the child record and populate the field accordingly.

Now you could also create an onUpdate plugin to compare the account.bankaccount field with the bankaccount.bankaccount field and update the bankaccount.bankaccount accordingly.

This was rather hard to explain, so feel free to post questions and I'll answer them.

Thanks

Bossie

Showing and hiding fields based on another field

Hi All,

This is not a new topic, but it does creep up in the forums from time to time. I thought it may be easier to write a blog entry on the topic.

So here is the scenario, you have a picklist (or any other field) and you want to show and hide other fields based on this. Let's say your picklist field is called "mypicklist" and you have two other fields, one is a text field called "mytextfield" and one is a lookup called "mylookup". The values in the picklist are "Show Text Field", with a value of 1 and "Show Lookup Field" with a value of 2. You want to show/hide the fields accordingly.

Firstly you need to write the following code in the mypicklist onChange event:

if (crmForm.all.mypicklist.DataValue == 1) //show text field
{
//hide the lookup
crmForm.all.mylookup.style.display = 'none';
crmForm.all.mylookup_c.style.display = 'none'; //note the _c
crmForm.all.mylookup_d.style.display = 'none'; //note the _d, only required for lookups

//show the text field
crmForm.all.mytextfield.style.display = 'inline';
crmForm.all.mytextfield_c.style.display = 'inline'; //note the _c
}
else if (crmForm.all.mypicklist.DataValue == 2) //show loookup
{
//hide the lookup
crmForm.all.mylookup.style.display = 'inline';
crmForm.all.mylookup_c.style.display = 'inline'; //note the _c
crmForm.all.mylookup_d.style.display = 'inline'; //note the _d, only required for lookups

//show the text field
crmForm.all.mytextfield.style.display = 'none';
crmForm.all.mytextfield_c.style.display = 'none'; //note the _c
}
else // hide all
{
//hide the lookup crmForm.all.mylookup.style.display = 'none';
crmForm.all.mylookup_c.style.display = 'none'; //note the _c
crmForm.all.mylookup_d.style.display = 'none'; //note the _d, only required for lookups

//show the text field
crmForm.all.mytextfield.style.display = 'none';
crmForm.all.mytextfield_c.style.display = 'none'; //note the _c
}

As you can see, each field has two (three for lookups) sections that has to be hidden, the first section is identified by the field schema name and represents the textbox area. The second, represented by the fieldname following by an "_c" represents the label area. Lookups also has an additional area, replresented by the fieldname followed by an "_d" which represents the lookup button. Each of these sections needs to be shown/hidden individually.

The second part is ensuring these are hidden/shown after they are saved, so the exact same code above needs to be placed in the form load event too. It may also make your life easier to create a global function in the onload event and then call this function from both within the onload event and the picklist onchange event. Something like:

ShowHideField = function()
{
//all the above code goes in here
}

// then call the above in both the onload and the relevent onchange event
ShowHideField();

The above goes for most field types and you can also show or hide fields based on whether they contain data or not with the following:

if (crmForm.all.mypicklist.DataValue != null) //show text field
{
...
}

Hope this helps

Bossie

Clearing a value from a DynamicEntity object

Hi all,

This was by no means something I discovered myself, Patrick Verbeeten suggested this as a solution to a problem I had in the forums. I thought it would be a good idea to pass on the information though.

Lets say you have a DynamicEntity object and you need to clear one of the values in a plugin, for example the parentid of a contact. Normally, to add an attribute to a DynamicEntity you would use the entity.Properties.Add(...) method, but the problem is that CRM only processes values that has a value.

What I tried initially was to remove the value using the entity.Properties.Remove(attributename) method. This did delete the attribute, but on saving the DynamicEntity, it did not save this attribute to the server but instead left it the way it was.

What Patrick suggested was to use the null value coupled with each crm attribute type, example CrmDateTime.Null or CrmNumber.Null. So what I did was to add the null value to the PropertyBag and set the acctual value to null.

entity.Properties.Add(new CrmDateTimeProperty(CrmDateTime.Null));

What is very important here is that each attribute type has it's own Null value, you cannot interchange CrmDateTime.Null and CrmNumber.Null.

The only exception to this seems to be a string type attribute, you only need to assign the value as an empty string "". Note that you may also be able to use the String.Empty method, I have not tried this yes but would say that this should also work.

Thanks

Paul Reyneke

Decrypting the Soap Exceptions thrown by CRM 4.0

I know this has been covered a million times before, but for those new to CRM, here's how to get around the unhelpful soap exception "Server was unable to process request".

Make sure you catch the soap exception, not just the standard System.Exception, this will open up an object called Details that has a property called InnerText. This will give you some more information surrounding the actual cause of the exception. But make sure you catch the System.Exception too, just in case.

So:

try
{
...
}
catch (System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException ex)
{
throw new InvalidPluginExecutionException(ex.Message+", "+ex.Detail.InnerText);
}
catch (System.Exception ex)
{
throw new InvalidPluginExecutionException(ex.Message);
}

Have fun,
Bossie