I had the privilege to deliver a lecture about Dynamics 365 Azure Integration Patterns in the DynamicsPower! Tel Aviv event last week.
This is the first 365 Saturday event in Israel, gathering Power Platform MVPs and experts from around the world to share their insights with the community.
I would like to thank Victor Dantas & Liran Debbi for their efforts in organizing this awesome event.
Click here to download my presentation.
Looking at the list of traditional CRM activities I always miss the SMS, being a common and effective type of communication between organizations and customers.
Sending SMS triggered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 events (e.g. Case created) used to be a developer’s task. You had to write Plugin or Custom Workflow Activity code to access the SMS provider web service and maintain it as endpoints sometime change.
With Flow you can integrate applications in a declarative manner so an event in one application will trigger an action in another application along with custom conditional logic and even wait capabilities (similar to Dynamics 365 internal Workflow Wait step).
In this post, I’ll walkthrough the process of setting up SMS sending without coding using Flow and Twilio (SMS provider).
a. Microsoft Dynamics 365 instance (trial will do)
b. Twilio account (trial will do – click +sign up in Twilio home page)
b. In the dialog, choose the suggested number or select a different one.
c. Go to the Home tab and note the Account SID and Auth Token keys, you will need these later
b. In My Flows tab click the ‘+ Create from blank’
c. In the search box, type in Dynamics and from the results list select the ‘Dynamics 365 – When a record is created’ trigger
d. In the Organization Name select the name of your Dynamics 365 instance. In the entity name dropdown select the entity for which the Flow will listen
e. Click the ‘New Step’ button and then ‘Add an action’
f. Search and Select the Twilio – Send Text Message (SMS) action
g. Feed in a name for your Twilio account (for future Flows) and keys from your Twilio Home tab: Account SID goes into the Account ID box, Auth token goes to the Access Token box
h. Feed in the your Twilio assigned Phone number in the From Phone Number box. Feed the target phone number in the To phone number. Feed in the SMS text. Note you can map dynamic data from the Case record into the text or target phone number
i. Click ‘Create Flow’ and then ‘Done’
c. In Flow management console Click ‘Manage’
d. You can view your Flow, edit and deactivate it here. Clicking the i will show you the Flow instances details and running results
Implementation Notes
I am back.
It has been a while since my last post. About a month ago I started a new job as a Dynamics TSP (Technology Solution Professional) at Microsoft. It is a technical role aimed to support Dynamics related sales processes.
Sadly, It means giving up my MVP title, as Microsoft employees are not eligible for this award.
This is a major change for me. In the last 8 years I was self employed of a sort, without a regular schedule, office or boss. Switching to work in one of the largest corporations on the planet is overwhelming. But in a good way. Although I am still drinking from the firehose, I can now access deep and broad layers of knowledge I was missing before.
I have been writing this blog since 2009 and plan to continue. Although I am a Microsoft employee now, the opinions and views stated in this blog are my own.
So now, armed with new knowledge and super powers, this blog is getting even better. Stay tuned.
Although this Help article states that with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016/Online “You can’t include a web resource in a form header or footer”, you certainly can.
Sadly, form Footer Web Resource no longer display any content (as it did in version 2015). Form header displays content correctly, but adding it will spread the header fields all over the form width.
If you are ok with the UI, you might want to access the header Web Resource programmatically via JavaScript. Maybe when a form attribute value changes, the Web Resource content should change dynamically.
Unlike header attributes, which can be accessed using Xrm.Page.getControl(“header_name”), the header Web Resource can not be accessed this way as it seem to be invisible to the getControl function.
So how can the header Web Resource ‘Listen’ to form and field events?
Since Web Resource can access the Xrm.Page object via the parent object, it has full access to the form elements and events. The addOnChange function allows the the Web Resource code to register an internal function as an event handler for a form or field event.
The following sample demonstrates HTML Web Resource located in the Account form header area, ‘listening’ to the Account Name attribute change event.
The code is located in the HTML Web Resource:
//register event handler to the account name attribute onChange event
function registerRefreshEvent()
{
if(parent.Xrm.Page != null)
{
parent.Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.get(“name”).addOnChange(refreshContent);
}
}
//do something with the Web Resource content…
function refreshContent()
{
alert(“Refreshing Web Resource content…”);
}
registerRefreshEvent();
I recently noticed that in version 2016, the option to export records for update (available in version 2015 as seen below) has vanished from the Export To Excel dialog.
When checked, this option allows you to update the exported data and later on use the Import Wizard tool to update existing records.
Consulting Faridun Kadir, a fellow MVP, I learned that exporting MSCRM records to a static worksheet exports records GUID (record unique identifier) by default as a hidden column. This GUID is later used by the Import Wizard mechanism to determine if the imported record is to be created or updated.
For this reason, the ‘Make this data available for re-importing’ checkbox was removed from the Export to Excel dialog.
As you can see above, the hidden columns title includes a warning (‘DO Not Modify’). Indeed, changing these columns data will end with an import failure. So although exposing these columns by itself will not cause any harm, you better leave it hidden to prevent an accidental change.
All you have to do in order to update existing records is to update required value in the Excel file and import via the Import Wizard. You can also add new records which will be created in the same import job.
Entity scoped Business Rules run on both client and server side. On the server side, Business Rules are executed synchronously when a record is saved (created or updated) and this means that in some cases, Business Rules can replace synchronous Plug-ins. Business Rules UX is better and maintenance wise, implementing business logic using the declarative Business Rule is preferred over Plug-in custom code.
Sounds great, but for some Business Rule actions the meaning of running on the server side is a bit obscure:
As for the other actions, I assume the Set visibility action is meaningless on server side and also that Set field/default value actions work on both client and server side in the same manner.
To test these three actions on the server side, I created and updated an Account record via the OrganizationService API in a synchronous manner while activating only the relevant Business Rule. Following are the various tests and results:
Client side test:
Server side test result: Account record is not created, the caller receives the designated error message
Business Rule definition:
Client side test:
Server side test result: Account record can not be created without specifying a value for required field
Business Rule definition:
Client side test:
Server side test result: Account record is created successfully although the Account Number field is set to be locked by the Business Rule
Conclusion: Show error message and Set business required actions perform on server side similar to a Plug-in. The Lock or unlock field action is meaningless on server side.
One of the professional benefits I gain from training Microsoft Dynamics CRM courses appears from time to time in the form of an innocent question from a student. A question which makes me stop for a moment and think… What would Mr. Spock answer to this?
Here is one: Does a Rollup field calculation take the user’s privileges into account?
Let me demonstrate: a user has access to a Project record which contains the Total hours consumed. This is a Rollup field which sums up the related Activity Report records Total Hours field value. The user Security Roles prevent him for reading any Activity Report records.
Having this, when the user activates the Total hours consumed field on demand calculation functionality, would the result be zero?
Humm… on one hand, It seems logical to expect that if the user has no access to the data used for calculation, he will get partial or no calculation result. On the other hand, displaying partial or no result can lead the user to the wrong business decision.
After testing this scenario I can answer that Rollup field calculation ignores the user’s privileges. Even without access, the Activity Reports entity, a user can activate a Rollup field on demand calculation and get a result as if he had full privileges.
The reason for this is that Rollup fields calculation is performed under the privileges of the System user account rather than the actual operating user. If you want to prevent read access to calculation result, use Field Level Security as Microsoft suggests in this article.
I always assumed Field Level Security privileges are somehow inclusive, meaning you can’t have Update privilege without Read. I was wrong.
Defining the Field Security privileges like this
will prevent the profile users from reading the secured field value but will allow them to create with and update it.
I can’t think of a business process which requires such behavior, but since Field Level Security apply to APIs as well as UI, it may be useful when external applications are required to update a secured value but are not allowed to retrieve it.
There is no built view in Microsoft Dynamics CRM that shows the different solutions to which a component (such as Workflow Rule) is related. If you have many solutions, iterating through all of them can be exhausting and time consuming.
The following query retrieve all solution which contain a Workflow Rule named testwf:
<fetch version=”1.0″ mapping=”logical”>
<entity name=”solution”>
<attribute name=”friendlyname”></attribute>
<link-entity name=”solutioncomponent” from=”solutionid” to=”solutionid” >
<link-entity name=”workflow” from=”workflowid” to=”objectid”>
<filter>
<condition attribute=”name” operator=”eq” value=”testwf“></condition>
</filter>
</link-entity>
</link-entity>
</entity>
</fetch>
The solutioncomponent entity binds elements such as Workflow Rule to Solutions. The solutionid attribute maps each solutioncomponent record to a Solution record and the objectid attrbiute maps to the Workflow Rule. Off course, you can find any solution element with a similar query, just change the relationship attribute.
Here is the query result which includes two solutions:
[
{
"formattedValues": {},
"friendlyname": "Default Solution",
"solutionid": "fd140aaf-4df4-11dd-bd17-0019b9312238"
},
{
"formattedValues": {},
"friendlyname": "Web API Samples",
"solutionid": "1c35faf2-ee8c-4a1c-a838-d49692d0d941"
}
]
You can use various tools to run FetchXML queries, I am using XRMToolBox.
Version 2016 Word Templates is a useful feature with one noticeable limitation – when generating a Word Template based document, only one target record can be selected.
In many business scenarios, users would like to select multiple records (maybe after executing an Advanced Find query) and generate relevant document in one or two clicks.
In this post, I’ll demonstrate a customization based solution for generating Word Template based documents for multiple business records. In a following post, I’ll supply a more generic solution which can be applied to any template/entity.
Here is the final result – after implementing the following walkthrough, users will be able select multiple records and apply a manual Workflow Rule which will generate template based document for each record, saving it as a file attachment:
In the following walkthrough I am using the Account entity along with the Account Summary template. You can use any template enabled entity with any built-in/custom template.
YanivRDT 