torsdag 5 oktober 2017

Data Sources or Dataset tab in SSDT

This is mainly a note for myself because my SQL Server Data Tool for Visual Studio 2013 keeps hiding the Report Data tab and it takes a good 20 minutes for me to find how to get it back each time.

The magic combination (tm) is Ctrl-Alt-D. I just can't find how to get it back using the menus and I always forget what I should use to search for a solution to this.

Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se 

onsdag 4 oktober 2017

Business process error from custom workflow activity

Last week I was working on a custom workflow activity which was reading some data from CRM and returned a string which was going to be but into an email. This shouldn't be a big operation but I still encountered errors which I hadn't seen before.

The error message that was thrown to me was  System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: '!!0[] System.Array.Empty()'. Now that's not very informative at all.
Since this was a Dynamics 365 online I'd thought that there might be a ton of stuff that wasn't really working together and I was REALLY going through the code to see what I had written but didn't really find anything weird, just your average custom workflow activity input and output really.

Enter search engine again. https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/1097462/missingmethodexception-additional-information-method-not-found-0-system-array-empty gave me some pointers where the .NET team responded the following:

Hi

Most likely what is happening is that:
- The code is compiling against .NET 4.6, where the reference assemblies include Array.Empty<T>().
- The Roslyn compiler sees that Array.Empty<T> is available and so uses it when generating the empty array needed for the params.
- The compiled app is trying to run on .NET 4.5 where Array.Empty doesn’t exit.

If the above is not the case, please let us know. Otherwise, this is by-design.

Thank you,
Alex
.NET Framework

Ok, that was at least pointing to somewhere. I was in fact using .NET 4.6 since it was the default version in VS 2015 and I didn't really think about that and I thought that the Dynamics server would support it. When I changed the .NET version to 4.5.1 it started working as I hoped it would so, new stuff isn't always the way to go.

Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se 

måndag 2 oktober 2017

Problem updating an 8.0 organization to 8.2

It's been a bit of tumbleweed here the past couple of months due to me being on paternity leave. In my naive mind I thought that I was going to be able to do some testing and blogging while taking care of a one year old, the truth is you don't.
Today is my first day at work and I ran into issues right away while updating an 8.0 organization to 8.2. As usual a cryptic error took me on a bit of a hunt to what was needed and I found a solution which may or may not be ideal but it works so far. 

The error message said "14:41:07|   Info| Setting organization state.  New state = Failed
14:41:07|  Error| Update Organization with Id=84095b00-96bf-e511-80ba-00155d02e703 failed with Exception:
System.Exception: Error.ActionFailed Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.InstallDatabaseUpdatesAction ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot insert duplicate key row in object 'dbo.SolutionBase' with unique index 'ndx_UniqueName'. The duplicate key value is (SnapshotSolution80).
The statement has been terminated."

Right. Starting search engine power.
The first thing I found was http://kyledoestech.com/updating-crm-2016-to-dynamics-365-fails-with-duplicate-key-error/ which pretty much says, "restore the org db to a server running 8.1 and update it there, then do an update to 8.2". I don't have an 8.1 server available atm so I was hoping I could do something else.

Next stop, Denmark! "http://crmblog.dk/post/2017/01/03/Dynamics-365-Onpremise-Fejl-ved-opgradering-af-organisation.aspx"
Now, this says that the issue is in the solutionbase table, which the error message says too. There's a section called solution but I don't think that the solution is really stated, but I might be misreading it. It did help a little though since I started looking at what was in that table.

This is very much done at your own risk and is unsupported. So far it is working for me but I didn't have an 8.1 server available so this is a bit of a "hope this will work". I would probably not do this to a production organization but this was a test so I thought it was worth a shot.

What I did was to remove the line with SnapshotSolution80 with the command
delete from SolutionBase where SolutionId = '57A85212-B3B4-4C39-BCB0-5D5EF1F5FFC4'.
It looks like that will be re-inserted and I don't have a quick way of running the update on a 8.1 server too. After the upgrade there is a line with unique name "SnapshoySolution80" but with ha different solutionid so hopefully this has been a good dirty fix. So far I haven't seen any issues with my quick fix but keep in mind this is unsupported.
You could run it towards the uniquiname "SnapshotSolution80", which might be a good idea since there COULD be other lines with the same solutionid

Did I mention that this is unsupported

Oh, btw, this is unsuppported.

Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se