Retrieve Marketinglists attached to Campaign Activity

Today I've been doing some coding again and I've found an interesting situation. For my code I do need to find which marketing lists belong to a specific Campaign Activity. Apparently more people on the internet faced the same issue, but I haven't found anybody who supplied the answer on how to do that. I've managed to find an approach which works for both the fetchXml as well as a

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Document your CRM installation

Everybody knows the importance of documentation of a project. Thanks to Merijn van Mourik and some other guys there is a tool which can help you documenting your solution. This is a free tool which you can download from Codeplex: CRM 4 documentation.If you want to use this tool on a standalone machine or a machine without internet connection, then you should download and install the following

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Remove attributes from form which cannot be removed

There are some attributes on CRM default forms which you cannot remove. This post will show you how you can do this anyway. While doing so, please keep in mind that Microsoft must have good reasons to fix attributes on the form. Removing this might have implications, as always have a good backup ready.The steps you need to follow to remove are:- Export customizations for the specific entity-

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Walk through all elements on a form

In some cases it is required to set all attributes on a form to disabled or do some other logic like checking which attribute has been changed. To do this you do need to walk through each attribute of the CRM form. My fellow MVP Mitch Milam has posted the technique to do this more than a year ago:http://blogs.infinite-x.net/2007/11/21/disabling-all-fields-on-a-crm-form/The most important piece of

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Hiding elements: the next evolution

One of my colleagues, Richard McCormick, has written a blog post for the Avanade internal employees. He has asked me to make this post publically available since it might be interesting for more people. Read on and get great code samples on how to hide attributes, elements and sections.Hiding Links & Controls in CRM 4 Before I go on, I should point out that this solution is technically

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Displaying inactive records in associated view

In some situations you do want to show the inactive records in an associated view as well. My fellow MVP George Doubinski wrote an article about how to solve this by using a plugin:http://crm.georged.id.au/post/2008/03/07/Displaying-inactive-records-in-associated-view.aspx.In this post I will show that there are more routes to Rome. I've looked into the option of editing the query which is being

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Read-only URL Addressable Form

The SDK does describe URL Addressable Forms, but one thing which I do miss on this page, is details around how to link to a form in readonly format. This is done by using the following URL:http://server/orgname/_forms/readonly/readonly.aspx?objTypeCode=objectTypeCode.Of course you need to change the server to servername, orgname to organization name and the objectTypeCode to the entity object

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Using Advanced Find for FetchXML builder v4.0

Some time ago I have written an article about how to use the Advanced Find as FetchXML builder. Today I tried using the javascript:prompt() method on a CRM 4.0 deployment and found out that the code doesn't work anymore. This alert script does still work though.javascript:alert(resultRender.FetchXml.value);A slightly different code which might be easier to remember is:javascript:alert(

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Custom entities and attributes in a plug-in

You cannot create a webservice in Visual Studio when you're writing a plugin. Instead you need to use the method context.CreateCrmService(true);. There is only one single issue when using this approach. You cannot leverage the power of IntelliSense in Visual Studio. Visual Studio will not recognize your custom entities and attributes. How to work with this? The only correct answer is "Dynamic

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Unauthorized error after deploying your custom application

I've been working on deploying an application today. I received the error "Unauthorized" all the time and did not know why. The website was deployed as a new virtual directory within the ISV folder, authentication was set to integrated windows authentication and the password which was supplied was correct. Still I was able to get this error message:Server Error in '/ISV/CustomApplication'

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Convert lead to contact, account and/or opportunity programmatically

Update: The codeproject missed a line of code. After you have executed the InitializeFromRequest, then you'll get a InitializeFromResponse. This response has got a entity in it. This entity you will need to create. The entity does not yet get created by executing the InitializeFromRequest! The line to add is:Guid entityId = service.Create(rps.Entity);Today I needed some code which does convert a

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Plug-in not working

One of the most read pages on my blog is the list of reasons why a callout won't work. Since the release of CRM 4.0 we do not have callouts anymore, but we're using plug-ins for extending CRM. This article will contain all the reasons that I find on why a plug-in is not working.Error:"Unable to load the plug-in assembly"There are multiple reasons why this error can occur. These reasons include:-

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Resizing windows

If you have a lot of data on an entity form, then you sometimes do want to force the page to open in full screen mode. There's a small javascript which will allow you to do this. Just add these two lines of code to the form onload of your entity form:window.moveTo(0,0);window.resizeTo(screen.availWidth, screen.availHeight);Also, when you open a custom page you can also set the window size by

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Stopping and continuing a save event

For some customizations you do need to stop the form onsave event, perform some business logic and continue the save event. An example would be that in specific conditions are met when a record is saved, then a popup will need to be shown. After filling in data in the popup and pressing a continue button on the popup, then the save operation would need to continue. The SDK helps in this situation

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Javascript and IFrames

I'm struggling with IFrames and JavaScript quite often. When you're working with this as well, the first thing to keep in mind is:Deselecte the option "restrict cross site scripting" (in dutch "Het uitvoeren van scripts tussen frames beperken")That usually saves a lot of troubles.Furthermore, the next step is to create JavaScripts. One which I use quite often, is one which allows me to access a

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CrmDateTime conversion to DateTime

When working with CrmDateTime, you'll notice that this type does have a .value attribute, but the type of this attribute is string. There is no attribute to get the .net class DateTime out of your CrmDateTime. If you do want to use a DateTime anyway, you'd easily need to convert it. You could use any of these:Convert.ToDateTime(crmdatetime.Value)DateTime.Parse(crmdatetime.Value)For more

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AttributeInfo.TypeName(int) != AttributeMetadata.Type.Name(float)

You might bump into an error message while importing an entity from a customizations file. The error show could be:Error: lead: AttributeInfo.TypeName(int) != AttributeMetadata.Type.Name(float)The cause of this error is a mismatch in attribute type. Usually a field has been removed in the other environment and has been recreated with another attribute type. The type in your destination CRM system

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Improve performance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The performance of your CRM implementation is one of the key factors for customer acceptance. There are multiple options available for optimizing your system. Here's a list to get started:Microsoft - Optimize Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0Microsoft - Optimize Microsoft Dynamics CRM 1.2Aaron Elder - Optimize the CRM Webservice CallsBrein Reid - Reduce the amount of useless calls to IIS 6.0

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Fetch the ObjectTypeCode based on EntityName

Not a very rocket science, but just something again that I don't want to type over and over again. So here's a piece of code that helps you to fetch the ObjectTypeCode based on the EntityName for CRM 3.0:private int GetObjectTypeCode (string entityName){ CrmMetaDataService.MetadataService metadataService = new CrmMetaDataService.MetadataService(); metadataService.Credentials =

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Creating Environment independent solutions

When developing a solution for CRM, make sure that it runs on all different crm environments. Many implementations have their CRM installation on another port compared to the development environments. A way to handle this, is to look at the location of MS CRM as it is stored in the registery.// Set default valuesprivate const string CRM_REG_DIRECTORY = @"software\Microsoft\mscrm\";private const

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