I have just patched some servers to SP1 for Dynamics CRM 2013 and as usual it went smoothly, well most of it. The Language pack for Swedish had some hickups and as usual the error messages are far from brilliant.
So patch Thursday was the agenda last evening and the main show was SP1 for CRM 2013, a bit late perhaps but given the update rollup mess of 2011, I might even advocate it was quite early.
Some background, the server that gave me the issue is a lab server running on Windows Server 2008R2 and has been upgraded from CRM 2011. When I did the upgrade from 2011 I uninstalled the MUI, which was Swedish/1053, and installed the MUI of CRM 2013, however the update rollups of the MUI was still present in the list of installed updates, even though the product was uninstalled. That is perhaps not the most pretty uninstall job I've ever seen.
When I installed the CRM 2013 MUI everything was working so I didn't think much about it, perhaps it was just a text record still present was my thought. When I was installing UR1 and 2 for CRM 2013 everything was working too, so no biggie.
However, last night the MUI installation of CRM 2013 crashed with the following error message: The given key was not present in the dictionary.
Googling this gave me not so much but there was one link to Microsoft's forums saying that the problem is a registry entry in HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CusrrenVersion/Uninstall/KB29411390_Mui_1053, which indeed was where the install log was pointing.
To start with, this is sort of funny considering that the SP1 is that very KB, so what is going on here?
The solution in the forum post was to reinstall the server since they didn't want to mess with the registry. That was not perhaps what I was looking forward to be doing so the hunt continued.
Considering that the issue seemed to have something to do with uninstall information I started by trying to reinstall the MUI SP2 if something had gone wrong there. That repair went smoothly with no issues. Next stop was the remaining SP of the CRM 2011 MUI, which had not been possible to remove earlier since the product had been removed.
Despite this I tried to uninstall it and to my great surprise it actually started doing something, which would take 30 minutes to complete. After a bit of waithing the UR was uninstalled with the popup message sayin "repair complete", oh well, it's gone now. Looking at the list of installed programs, there was a CRM 2011 MUI present not, so I uninstalled that one too.
After this operation, the install of CRM 2013 MUI SP1 went as expected. Now I'm not very impressed by the uninstallers of Dynamics CRM, why isn't the rollups uninstalled with the program? The next question I have is why did this become an issue with SP1 but not with UR1 and 2? Lastly how come I was able to uninstall the UR of CRM 2011 all of a sudden and that it seems to have reinstalled the MUI while I was uninstalling.
Maybe this can help someone out there.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
onsdag 1 oktober 2014
tisdag 16 september 2014
Setting the starting tab on the Wall/Activity/Notes part on Account or Contact form
I recently had yet another WTF moment with CRM 2013. This time it was the "notes-subgrid" of the contact form that made me slightly confused.
To briefly describe the problem, on the contact and account form in CRM 2013 there's a multi-choice part that can be switched between news, activities and notes. This "subgrid" is customizable to a certain extent and one thing you can set is the starting tab.
The customer had been upgraded from CRM 4 to 2013 and had the forms upgraded, so far so good. I was able to set the starting tab to notes as per the customer's wishes but when I opened the form the subgrid was set to activities, even though I saw that the notes tab was selected at first and then switched to activities.
Since this was an organization that had been upgraded from CRM 4 there were no sitemap settings for the activity feeds which could be an issue according to Mark Magoli's blog.
After following the steps described I was able to set the starting tab, all fine. The funny thing is that if you disable the activity feeds for the entity, you also disable the ability to set the starting tab and the leftmost tab is selected, in my case this was the activity tab.
This is very annoying since the customer isn't interested in the activities or the news feed.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
To briefly describe the problem, on the contact and account form in CRM 2013 there's a multi-choice part that can be switched between news, activities and notes. This "subgrid" is customizable to a certain extent and one thing you can set is the starting tab.
The customer had been upgraded from CRM 4 to 2013 and had the forms upgraded, so far so good. I was able to set the starting tab to notes as per the customer's wishes but when I opened the form the subgrid was set to activities, even though I saw that the notes tab was selected at first and then switched to activities.
Since this was an organization that had been upgraded from CRM 4 there were no sitemap settings for the activity feeds which could be an issue according to Mark Magoli's blog.
After following the steps described I was able to set the starting tab, all fine. The funny thing is that if you disable the activity feeds for the entity, you also disable the ability to set the starting tab and the leftmost tab is selected, in my case this was the activity tab.
This is very annoying since the customer isn't interested in the activities or the news feed.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
onsdag 13 augusti 2014
Workflows not triggering and how to trigger workflows without changing any data
I had a problem at a customer last week where a workflow wasn't triggering after I set the trigger field with a script. Very annoying troubleshooting of that one which lead to trying to set the field in pre execution plugin, post execution plugin and changing the field manually. Finally I found that the plugin was the culprit.
To begin with, it's not my code to begin with, and I'm not saying that to put blame on anyone more that I didn't fully see what was happeing. The problem looks as follows. There's a button in the ribbon of a CRM 2011 implementation that will create a printout and that button changes two fields, a optionset and a bool field. This is done in a plugin which reads the optionset and acts on the input value, then resets the optionset by doing a post execution update of the object with the optionset nulled.
Originally the workflow was triggering and checking the state of the optionset, however that field is changed in the entity plugin before the workflow is reading it so the logic didn't work. I chose to add the bool field and change that with the same script, now when I was looking in the audit the field obviously changed but the workflow didn't trigger.
Right, I toggled the bool field manually, which showed in the audit log, and this triggered the workflow. That bit did not do miracles to my mental healt I might add, but it got worse.
Next step in my troubleshooting was to add the bool field to the pre execution state plugin, that didn't help either so I did a final shot at doing it in the same step that was nulling the optionset and then updating the object,
Now the workflow was triggered, twice (back to mental health issues). At this time my colleague and boss Gustaf was back from vacation and we started talking about this. His advise was to turn off the plugins and see what happened, this did indeed work for the workflow triggering so now we had the culprit under the glass.
The code that did the nulling of the optionset looked something like this: which
target.Attributes.Clear();
target[optionset] = null;
service.Update(target);
which I changed to
Entity ent = new Entity(target.logicalname);
ent.Id = target.Id;
ent[optionset] = null;
service.Update(ent);
this helped with the workflow triggering but I didn't like to save the object twice so I reworked it and reset the optionset in the pre execution step and moved the value that was interesting to the shared variables instead.
Now to the fun and games with workflows part. Can this be used? It might, but I'm not entirely sure of the application.
I had to try this at home with a very simple plugin, I had done some setting up of a entity in our lab environment to see if there was a problem with changing field with scripts to trigger workflows, it wasn't.
I set up a workflow triggering on a bool field
I had the following code that I played around with a bit, this is the final incarnation.
public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
{
if (context.InputParameters.Contains("Target") && context.InputParameters["Target"] is Entity)
{
Entity entity = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];
if (context.Stage == 20)
{
RunPre(entity, service);
}
else if (context.Stage == 40)
{
RunPost(entity, service);
}
}
}
private void RunPre(Entity entity, IOrganizationService service)
{
}
private void RunPost(Entity entity, IOrganizationService service)
{
//entity.Attributes.Clear();
entity.Attributes.Add("crmk_testar_chkb", true);
//service.Update(entity);
}
With this code I reproduced the behaviour that the workflow isn't triggered, triggered once and triggered twice with the update of the bool field "crmk_testar_chkb". The rationale being the "entity.Attributes.Clear()" totally blocking the workflow, if clearing the attributes and then adding the field again giving one workflow triggered. Updaging the object with the field in the attributes giving two workflows.
Finally, when you're adding the field to the post execution step property bag funny stuff happens. The workflow gets triggered without any field change being entered into the database.
As you can see in the audits of 9.45 pm and onward, only the string field testar_strng is updated.
And here are the workflows triggered. The 9.45 one is triggered from a bool toggle at 9.45 in the audit but the following three are triggered by adding the field to the property bag in the post execution step plugin.
This may not be any news for some of you out there that know youre plugin execution pipeline chart on your five fingers, but it's not something I have run into earlier.
I have been thinking about if this is something that might be useful in some situation, I haven't found one yet since you probably can trigger the workflow anyway, byt there might be times when it's useful. It's also good to know that emptying the property bag will stop your workflows from triggering since that is done in the post execution step.
NB, this is verified in CRM 2011, but will probably behave the same in 2013.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
To begin with, it's not my code to begin with, and I'm not saying that to put blame on anyone more that I didn't fully see what was happeing. The problem looks as follows. There's a button in the ribbon of a CRM 2011 implementation that will create a printout and that button changes two fields, a optionset and a bool field. This is done in a plugin which reads the optionset and acts on the input value, then resets the optionset by doing a post execution update of the object with the optionset nulled.
Originally the workflow was triggering and checking the state of the optionset, however that field is changed in the entity plugin before the workflow is reading it so the logic didn't work. I chose to add the bool field and change that with the same script, now when I was looking in the audit the field obviously changed but the workflow didn't trigger.
Right, I toggled the bool field manually, which showed in the audit log, and this triggered the workflow. That bit did not do miracles to my mental healt I might add, but it got worse.
Next step in my troubleshooting was to add the bool field to the pre execution state plugin, that didn't help either so I did a final shot at doing it in the same step that was nulling the optionset and then updating the object,
Now the workflow was triggered, twice (back to mental health issues). At this time my colleague and boss Gustaf was back from vacation and we started talking about this. His advise was to turn off the plugins and see what happened, this did indeed work for the workflow triggering so now we had the culprit under the glass.
The code that did the nulling of the optionset looked something like this: which
target.Attributes.Clear();
target[optionset] = null;
service.Update(target);
which I changed to
Entity ent = new Entity(target.logicalname);
ent.Id = target.Id;
ent[optionset] = null;
service.Update(ent);
this helped with the workflow triggering but I didn't like to save the object twice so I reworked it and reset the optionset in the pre execution step and moved the value that was interesting to the shared variables instead.
Now to the fun and games with workflows part. Can this be used? It might, but I'm not entirely sure of the application.
I had to try this at home with a very simple plugin, I had done some setting up of a entity in our lab environment to see if there was a problem with changing field with scripts to trigger workflows, it wasn't.
I set up a workflow triggering on a bool field
I had the following code that I played around with a bit, this is the final incarnation.
public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
{
if (context.InputParameters.Contains("Target") && context.InputParameters["Target"] is Entity)
{
Entity entity = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];
if (context.Stage == 20)
{
RunPre(entity, service);
}
else if (context.Stage == 40)
{
RunPost(entity, service);
}
}
}
private void RunPre(Entity entity, IOrganizationService service)
{
}
private void RunPost(Entity entity, IOrganizationService service)
{
//entity.Attributes.Clear();
entity.Attributes.Add("crmk_testar_chkb", true);
//service.Update(entity);
}
With this code I reproduced the behaviour that the workflow isn't triggered, triggered once and triggered twice with the update of the bool field "crmk_testar_chkb". The rationale being the "entity.Attributes.Clear()" totally blocking the workflow, if clearing the attributes and then adding the field again giving one workflow triggered. Updaging the object with the field in the attributes giving two workflows.
Finally, when you're adding the field to the post execution step property bag funny stuff happens. The workflow gets triggered without any field change being entered into the database.
As you can see in the audits of 9.45 pm and onward, only the string field testar_strng is updated.
And here are the workflows triggered. The 9.45 one is triggered from a bool toggle at 9.45 in the audit but the following three are triggered by adding the field to the property bag in the post execution step plugin.
This may not be any news for some of you out there that know youre plugin execution pipeline chart on your five fingers, but it's not something I have run into earlier.
I have been thinking about if this is something that might be useful in some situation, I haven't found one yet since you probably can trigger the workflow anyway, byt there might be times when it's useful. It's also good to know that emptying the property bag will stop your workflows from triggering since that is done in the post execution step.
NB, this is verified in CRM 2011, but will probably behave the same in 2013.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
torsdag 7 augusti 2014
Problems installing CRM 2013
Installing a product like Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, or any other verison for that matter, might be a smooth trip down the newly paved highway, it can also be slightly bumpier. Today I've noted a few problems which might occur and how to resolve them.
In most of these cases, the problem is a result of different pre reqs that aren't quite in place, however the problems don't seem to occur due to these gaps in security or whatever the problem might be because unfortunately the error messages shown aren't exactly spot on at all times.
Username errors.
One issue that might occur is that you enter your service account uid and password correct, however you still get an error saying that the username or password is incorrect. This may be a result of a too long username. CRM seems to be using the Windows Server 2000 type usrename with domain\username look. That type has a max length of 20 characters in the username which will indeed create an incorrect username if you type a username of 20+ characters. The funny thing here is that the AD actually takes more than 20 characters and tries to verify it against a 20 character username that has been truncated.
SQL Server Agent is not running
This is another issue that might occur, and yes sometimes it's actually the SQL Server Agent service that is not running, this seems to be turned off and set as start manually as default if you don't do something about it. This may also be caused by having the firewall block certain ports that the SQL is using, this is default port 1433 but in some cases you might need 445 to be open.
If the firewall rules don't help one issue that can give this error is that the installing user isn't system administrator on the SQL server instance that you're installing CRM on, a pre req to install CRM but if you miss it this error message isn't exactly pointing you in the right direction.
Reporting Services not responding
This is an issue that I have run into too. This may of course be so simple as the reporting services part of SQL Server isn't installed, but it can also be that during the installation the settings were not set to default so no settings are available and the reporting services databases are not created. To fix this, start the Reporting Services Configuration Manager and pretty much just go through all the tabs and click apply which will set the default values unless you want to change something.
Hope this will help someone with these errors.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
In most of these cases, the problem is a result of different pre reqs that aren't quite in place, however the problems don't seem to occur due to these gaps in security or whatever the problem might be because unfortunately the error messages shown aren't exactly spot on at all times.
Username errors.
One issue that might occur is that you enter your service account uid and password correct, however you still get an error saying that the username or password is incorrect. This may be a result of a too long username. CRM seems to be using the Windows Server 2000 type usrename with domain\username look. That type has a max length of 20 characters in the username which will indeed create an incorrect username if you type a username of 20+ characters. The funny thing here is that the AD actually takes more than 20 characters and tries to verify it against a 20 character username that has been truncated.
SQL Server Agent is not running
This is another issue that might occur, and yes sometimes it's actually the SQL Server Agent service that is not running, this seems to be turned off and set as start manually as default if you don't do something about it. This may also be caused by having the firewall block certain ports that the SQL is using, this is default port 1433 but in some cases you might need 445 to be open.
If the firewall rules don't help one issue that can give this error is that the installing user isn't system administrator on the SQL server instance that you're installing CRM on, a pre req to install CRM but if you miss it this error message isn't exactly pointing you in the right direction.
Reporting Services not responding
This is an issue that I have run into too. This may of course be so simple as the reporting services part of SQL Server isn't installed, but it can also be that during the installation the settings were not set to default so no settings are available and the reporting services databases are not created. To fix this, start the Reporting Services Configuration Manager and pretty much just go through all the tabs and click apply which will set the default values unless you want to change something.
Hope this will help someone with these errors.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
onsdag 9 juli 2014
Upgrade problems from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2013
I have currently been working on an upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2013 for one of our customers and ran into som unexpected problem when doing the final step of the upgrade from CRM 2011 CRM 2013.
To begin with, when you're doing an upgrade like this, you won't be able to retain any of the code since the JS syntax has changed as well as how you write plugins. This was the first mission which I thought was going to be easiest to do after upgrading the organization to CRM 2011 since all JS libraries are put into web resources and are easier to find.
At first I couldn't upgrade the organization to CRM 2011 but I thought that if I imported it to our CRM 4.0 server it might be a bit more compliant, possibly due to the fact that we have a higher roll up on that server than the production server that we got the db from. After a bounce on our CRM 4.0 server it imported neatly into CRM 2011.
The thing that happened then was that I couldn't remove the web resource with an error message saying that it could not find the assembly <name>.dll. It didn't matter if I put the assembly in the assembly folder on the server as it was present on the system I was migrating from I still got the error. It was also impossible to unregister the assemblies with the same error message.
The solution of that problem was to unregister the plugins in CRM 4.0 and do another import to CRM 2011 which worked fine.
Now, after removing all code I did a db backup and restore to the CRM 2013 server running UR2 and tried to import the organization there which gave me the following error:
22:00:14| Info| Applying slipstream dbUpdates to organization. Id=82fd6726-2701-e411-960f-00155d0a8302, UniqueName=crmorg.
22:01:37| Info| CrmAction execution time; InstallDatabaseUpdatesAction; 00:01:23.4180924
22:01:37| Error| Installer Complete: OrganizationUpgrader - Error encountered
22:01:37| Error| Exception occured during Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.OrganizationUpgrader: Error.ActionFailed Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.InstallDatabaseUpdatesAction
InnerException:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): Subquery returned more than 1 value. This is not permitted when the subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >= or when the subquery is used as an expression.
Subquery returned more than 1 value. This is not permitted when the subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >= or when the subquery is used as an expression.
The statement has been terminated.
This wasn't particularly helpful. After a few tries on different servers running different versions of SQL Server for example I still had the same error. Then my colleague pointed me to Chris Gognettas blog, which again was the saviour of the day.
It appears that at least in UR2 of CRM 2013 there's a check of something which happens to fail if the upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 happened within 24 hours of the upgrade to CRM 2013 you get this error so if you're in a hurry you need to change the datetime field pointed out in Chris' blog, this is an unsupported action so be sure to take backups before you start.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
To begin with, when you're doing an upgrade like this, you won't be able to retain any of the code since the JS syntax has changed as well as how you write plugins. This was the first mission which I thought was going to be easiest to do after upgrading the organization to CRM 2011 since all JS libraries are put into web resources and are easier to find.
At first I couldn't upgrade the organization to CRM 2011 but I thought that if I imported it to our CRM 4.0 server it might be a bit more compliant, possibly due to the fact that we have a higher roll up on that server than the production server that we got the db from. After a bounce on our CRM 4.0 server it imported neatly into CRM 2011.
The thing that happened then was that I couldn't remove the web resource with an error message saying that it could not find the assembly <name>.dll. It didn't matter if I put the assembly in the assembly folder on the server as it was present on the system I was migrating from I still got the error. It was also impossible to unregister the assemblies with the same error message.
The solution of that problem was to unregister the plugins in CRM 4.0 and do another import to CRM 2011 which worked fine.
Now, after removing all code I did a db backup and restore to the CRM 2013 server running UR2 and tried to import the organization there which gave me the following error:
22:00:14| Info| Applying slipstream dbUpdates to organization. Id=82fd6726-2701-e411-960f-00155d0a8302, UniqueName=crmorg.
22:01:37| Info| CrmAction execution time; InstallDatabaseUpdatesAction; 00:01:23.4180924
22:01:37| Error| Installer Complete: OrganizationUpgrader - Error encountered
22:01:37| Error| Exception occured during Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.OrganizationUpgrader: Error.ActionFailed Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.InstallDatabaseUpdatesAction
InnerException:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): Subquery returned more than 1 value. This is not permitted when the subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >= or when the subquery is used as an expression.
Subquery returned more than 1 value. This is not permitted when the subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >= or when the subquery is used as an expression.
The statement has been terminated.
This wasn't particularly helpful. After a few tries on different servers running different versions of SQL Server for example I still had the same error. Then my colleague pointed me to Chris Gognettas blog, which again was the saviour of the day.
It appears that at least in UR2 of CRM 2013 there's a check of something which happens to fail if the upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 happened within 24 hours of the upgrade to CRM 2013 you get this error so if you're in a hurry you need to change the datetime field pointed out in Chris' blog, this is an unsupported action so be sure to take backups before you start.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
tisdag 4 mars 2014
File size limitations in Dynamics CRM
A friend of mine asked me about file size limits the other week and wondered if it was possible to set different limitations on attachments and uploads. This made me start to look for these settings and I didn't find anything.
The scenario my friend was describing was that he wanted to limit file size on email attachemnts but at the same time allowing uploaded files of a larger size than those of the email. Today the only setting on file sizes are that of the attachments to emails and this setting is used for all file size limitations of the entire system, from emails to files you want to add to an account or a contact and also data imports. The latter can be amended somewhat by zipping the file but it might hinder a large data import.
This made me start a ticket on connect so if you have run into these kind of problems or think you might please go to the link below and vote for this issue and it might make it into the program in the future.
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/824869/different-file-size-limitations-in-dynamics-crm
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
The scenario my friend was describing was that he wanted to limit file size on email attachemnts but at the same time allowing uploaded files of a larger size than those of the email. Today the only setting on file sizes are that of the attachments to emails and this setting is used for all file size limitations of the entire system, from emails to files you want to add to an account or a contact and also data imports. The latter can be amended somewhat by zipping the file but it might hinder a large data import.
This made me start a ticket on connect so if you have run into these kind of problems or think you might please go to the link below and vote for this issue and it might make it into the program in the future.
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/824869/different-file-size-limitations-in-dynamics-crm
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
måndag 24 februari 2014
Change AD password on a virtual maching
Real shorty that I just spent 20 minutes to find...
Not CRM per se but to change your AD password on a virtual machine you can't press ctrl-alt-del since the host machine will catch that, instead hit ctrl-alt-end. This is probably well known stuff still it took me a good 20 minutes to find it so I thought I'd put it here as well.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
Not CRM per se but to change your AD password on a virtual machine you can't press ctrl-alt-del since the host machine will catch that, instead hit ctrl-alt-end. This is probably well known stuff still it took me a good 20 minutes to find it so I thought I'd put it here as well.
Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se
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