Developer Blog

  Overview In our projects, we have a requirement in which we need to have the functionality to generate some numbers (prefix or suffix) on the creation of a record. Most of the time, we end up undertaking a development or implementation of this through custom code, specifically through plug-ins. Traditional Approach In most of the projects, traditionally, we undertake the following approach to generate the auto-number functionality We usually create a custom entity with a set of attributes to store prefix, suffix, number, new number, entity name, and then perform some logic through a plugin on the creation of the record or at times during record update activities. Use any of the ready-to-use third-party managed solutions, which perform all this in the background. We simply need to tag out the entity name and attribute name where the value needs to be reflected. Dynamics CRM 9.0 Onwards We have certain Metadata properties of Attributes that have been introduced in CRM 9.0 onwa...

  Overview With the release of Dynamics 365 (Online) in July 2017, the concept of Virtual Entities has been introduced in Dynamics CRM. Virtual Entities as an initial feature supports the basic functionality to read the data from External Sources and present the same as a list or a record in Dynamics CRM. What is Virtual Entity? Virtual Entity is a special category of entity for which one has to mark the checkbox as true while creating a new entity. To be precise, it’s an Internal Metadata flag which is marked as true acting as a distinguishing factor for CRM. No entity is stored with existing physical tables in the database. It’s a concept and visualization of data from an external system. A Virtual Data Provider needs to be created which acts as a data source for the virtual entity. When we load the entity in CRM, a request is made to a virtual data provider which retrieves the data from the external system and then represents the same in Read-Only format. Explanation of Implemen...

  Introduction Dynamics CRM Power Pane is a powerful tool and basically, an extension to Google Chrome which enables a developer/end-user to get the relevant information from Dynamics CRM including Entity Name: Record Id, etc. which plays an important role while writing the code for the application, as the same is dependent over the schema name of attributes. It is very easy to use. After adding the extension into Chrome, we see a new orange lightning icon in the top left corner. After clicking the icon, we will see a menu, as in the image. Open a record in Dynamics CRM and click on the Orange Icon on the top of the browser. Record Actions At times, we need to identify the GUID of the record which has been opened by us in the browser to get more information of the record, or let's say, we need to get the Record Id for executing some custom code of ours Record Id is a unique id and it’s a primary key for a record.   Record URL  Record URL, as the name suggests, shows ...

  Introduction   Are you looking for a sample code to fetch data from Dynamics 365 CE using WebAPI? If yes, this post will help. We are discussing how to fetch the data based on the DateTime field from the account entity.   Requirement Retrieve account records that were created on or before today’s date. Solution   While writing a Web API request, the first thing to make sure of is to check all the available filters that we can use in our WebAPI request. You can get full details of supported  filters here .   Now, our requirement is to compare the data based on the current date, so the first thing we need is to get the current data and format it correctly using libraries, like Moment.js, or you can manually format it using the following. function  FormatDate() {        var  today =  new  Date();        var  month = today.getMonth() + 1;  /...