torsdag 23 augusti 2018

Merge request funnies

I haven't used merge in code for quite some time now, I think the last time I did that was when CRM 2013 was "the shit". Still a funny thing that happens, no biggie and I think most people that does these things get around it fairly quickly. It is however a glitch in the documentation that's worth knowing about.

The issue is in the MergeRequest which takes two inputs as mandatory according to the documentation. It's the "Target", an EntityReference which is a link to the master record, the one that will remain, then its the "SubordinateId" which is just a Guid to the record that should be merged.

So far, so good, now when you just have these two in your request, you get an error, the following error.

There is no UpdateContent, Now this is what the intellisence says about that variable
Not very large, but it says "Optional". It is not.
This variable is an "Entity", the same entity type that the merged records are and in this one you can add whatever fields from that entity that you want to be different from the Target record after the merge and, yes, you can enter whatever you want when you do this programmatically and not only from the secondary record.

Now, this hasn't changed since CRM 2013, it still says optional and you still get an exception if you think that the object is optional.

Small post, hope someone is helped.

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

måndag 23 april 2018

SSIS projects and (mainly) source control.





Again, a post which is sort of connected to CRM from Microsoft, at this time called Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. I've been doing some SSIS work to migrate data and ran into an issue with SSIS projects not updating and source control.

The issue is mainly a problem if you're using version control and multiple computers for development BUT, it seems that the project file isn't always saved which gives issues when you alter projects packages and the result is an error saying "The package file ‘package_name.dtsx’ is missing from the project directory. This package has been skipped, and project will continue to load." (or whatever the package name is)
The issue is that the project file doesn't seem to save even if you think it has been. So. Highlight the project file









Then go to File menu and chose save selected

 Now you can upload this to whatever version control you're using and then spread the info :)

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











onsdag 18 april 2018

This is loosly connected to CRM, SQL Server Management Studio tip of the day

How to connect an SQL Server Management Studio from a different domain?

run the command runas /netonly /user:domain\username ssms.exe


This is Gold!

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

torsdag 15 mars 2018

Issues publishing from Ribbon Workbench

We ran into issues publishing from Ribbon Workbench a couple of weeks ago and I just recently had time to check this out. My colleague reported this to me and I thought at first it had something to do with his account.

That wasn't the case. The reason why I thought that it was the account is that there were other issues as well. Now I don't have the exact error message since I don't want to revoke what I did but in general terms it said that you're not allowed to publish solutions, make sure you're a system administrator and that you have rights in the catalogue customizationimport.
The culprit folder

This was an on premise CRM 2016 with update 1 and I must have installed at least 10 of these. I've used Ribbon workbench on multiple installations since I first saw the application, probably in CRM 2011 and I have never seen this problem before. I really can't say what has happened and it doesn't appear in the customer's production server to the best of my knowledge.

The solution was to allow the account running Asynch Service to the customizationimport folder, which is located in your CRM server catalogue, as seen above at c:\program files\microsoft dynamics crm\customizationimport.

Again, first time I've seen this and I'm just amazed that the "this is the first time" just never seem to end :)

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

tisdag 16 januari 2018

CRM for Outlook and the updated TLS demands

If you're running Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and having issues with CRM for Outlook, there's an update available which will help.

This update isn't listed on the "update and hotfixes" page from Microsoft https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3142345/microsoft-dynamics-365-updates-and-hotfixes which is sort of strange. If you're running the CRM for Outlook (why is it still called CRM and not Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for Outlook btw?) and all of a sudden it stops connecting to your online deployment, this is probably your rescue: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=56327.
This applies to version 9.0 at least, maybe to 8.2 as well but I'm not sure about that.

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


måndag 8 januari 2018

Something happened around new year with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Enterprise Edition

Before Christmas we did an integration between an ERP system and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Enterprise Edition using the Web API. This integration was running fine until January 3 at 21.32 UTC+1 and by then it couldn't retrieve any data from Dynamics 365.

The only error that was thrown was that one or more errors had occurred and in the inner exception of that it said that "The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send." and at some other level "An error occurred while sending the request". Not much to go on.

I was pointed to this page by Thomas Sandsør on Facebook (from Microsoft, somewhat safe to open :)) saying that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will stop working at some time and if you move to .NET 4.6.2 you will be fine.

Now, that didn't quite happen since I still had the same issue running .NET 4.6.2. Digging continues and to my surprise I actually found something at stack overflow (maybe a bit less safe to click on) where they said that you should be able to connect by just using "https" in the connection string but I also found this line of code:"System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = System.Net.SecurityProtocolType.Tls12;"

Adding that to my code, which it seems I can do pretty much anywhere before I do a call, solves the problem and I'm again able to connect and retrieve data from the Web API.
The funny thing is that I was able to get a token all the time so the authentication actually worked, it was just the GET and PATCH and so on, I guess since the program crashed badly at the GET so I really don't know about the rest but it seems plausable.

Hope this helps.

***Edit
After reading Marius comment below I continued to search for a solution that didn't mean I hardcoded the TLS version which I agree is a ugly solution. This lead me to the following page at Microsoft which says that you have to opt in to get the TLS 1.2 version, that wasn't clear to me earlier so now it works on .NET 4.7 with the following row added to the config file
<runtime>
   <AppContextSwitchOverrides value="Switch.System.ServiceModel.DisableUsingServicePointManagerSecurityProtocols=false;Switch.System.Net.DontEnableSchUseStrongCrypto=false" /> 
</runtime>
 


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