stunnware's CRM corner

Filtered Views for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - v4.2

2009-11-30T10:00:00+01:00

I rarely post about product updates on this blog, but this time I make an exception. The reason is that the new features in the Filtered Views are great and I want to share it with you.

So far the Filtered Views allowed creating dynamic views based on parameters being supplied at runtime. With "at runtime" I mean that you pass parameters in your CRM script code. That was good enough to view associated data going well beyond the capabilities of a standard CRM view. However, good is never good enough, so here's the list of enhancements in the new release:

UI Filters to define custom search fields in filtered views
Multi-Language support
An entity context to activate field mappings when creating a new entity from a filtered view
Script support to perform typical tasks like hiding toolbar buttons or colorizing views

Probably the best explanation of what you can do with these new features is the following screenshot:

Stunnware Tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - Support for CRM Online

2009-10-02T22:00:00+01:00

I was asked yesterday whether support for CRM Online was planned for the Stunnware Tools and the JavaScript Factory. My answer was that it hasn't been implemented just because I never had access to CRM Online. That was a minor issue though, because I instantly got credentials to a test organization and even admin rights for testing. That was great and it turned out that having a framework combining a set of tools was a good decision, because once I had the code implemented to use the passport and CRM Online services, all tools started working instantly.

I had added support for the offline services recently and now the Stunnware Tools support anything: On-Premise, Partner Hosted (IFD), CRM Online and the Outlook Offline client. If I have implemented the automatic version check correctly and you haven't turned it off, then you may already be aware of the new release before having read this post.

The new version is available for download at http://www.stunnware.com/default.aspx?area=products&group=swtools4&subarea=swtools4-download.

Client Side Scripting - Converting date/time values to or from XML

2009-09-29T23:00:00+01:00

Being a mystery in the beginning it's now common knowledge how to use the CRM web services in CRM form scripts. However, there were two questions recently dealing with date fields. Date values in XML are notated in a way that you probably know from your .NET code, 2008-03-12T13:55:46+01:00 for instance. The .NET DateTime object can easily handle it, but the JavaScript Date object cannot. The Filtered Lookup of course supports date fields in queries and I implemented appropriate conversion methods. Feel free to use them.

Client Side Scripting - Customer Products

2009-09-28T17:00:00+01:00

There was an interesting thread in the CRM developer newsgroups recently. Assume that you have built your product catalog and use CRM to create opportunities, quotes, orders and invoices, or at least some of these entities. All of them refer to the products in your product catalog. Now consider your customers. If they order products from your company regularly, then they most likely store your products in their own system. However, they will use their own product numbers to refer to your products and when ordering they will tell you these product numbers and not yours.

The question was how to enable a user to search for a product using both the internal product number and the external product number, where with "external" I mean the product number used by the customer.

An easy solution is adding a custom attribute to the product entity, but of course you can then only store one product number. This approach doesn't work when dealing with multiple customers, unless you like having a product number field for each customer. As each product can have many customer product numbers, the solution is a customer product entity and a 1:n relationship between products and customer products:

The JavaScript Factory

2009-09-15T15:00:00+01:00

As mentioned in the last article published a few minutes ago I had some work to do in the recent months. New major releases of the Filtered Lookup, which now supports multi-select lookup fields, the Filtered Views, Favorite Views and finally the JavaScript Factory.

JavaScript Factory

Most readers of this blog certainly are developers and most are developing CRM solutions. One part of CRM development are form scripts and my personal feeling is that many if not the majority of developers are still using the CRM editor to write script code.

This editor is a simple text box without any added functionality and while acceptable for smaller code changes it’s a real pain when working with larger code files.

A simple workaround is to copy the code from the CRM code window into a JavaScript file in Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2008 has IntelliSense support for JavaScript and at least provides help for the objects of the document object model (DOM). However, as Visual Studio 2008 doesn’t know about CRM, it cannot provide IntelliSense for CRM-specific objects.

Furthermore you cannot split large files into modules easily. It is possible to dynamically load JavaScript libraries into CRM forms, but managing such libraries is a manual step.

For developers using Microsoft technologies it's usually a no-brainer to use Visual Studio and developing CRM form scripts shouldn't be different. If you search the Internet for articles on how to edit form scripts in Visual Studio then you will find some and if they are sufficient for you then you're done. Anyone else is welcome to have a closer look at the JavaScript Factory, which provides the following features:

Creates a Visual Studio Solution for any CRM organization, extracts the JavaScript code and enables direct editing in Visual Studio 2008.
Merges the OnLoad, OnChange and OnSave event handlers into a single file for easier editing.
Allows multiple source files for each entity.
Provides IntelliSense support for the entire CRM form object model, including custom entities and attributes.
Saves and publishes changes directly from Visual Studio 2008.
Updates existing solutions with updated customizations.
Starts full create and update forms directly from Visual Studio 2008.
Manages organization-specific and -unspecific JavaScript libraries.
Builds the form script by compiling the form code and all referenced libraries. As a result you have a single script file in CRM, but can have dozens or even hundreds of modules containing these files.
Because of the file-based solution approach you can use version control systems to manage your code.
Supports On-Premise and IFD setups.

That's just the Visual Studio part. The CRM JavaScript Factory for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is a server-side module that can be used to support developer teams:

Builds CRM form scripts on the fly without having to publish changes.
Enables developers to edit the script code and to take full advantage of the library management and IntelliSense support, even without the CRM JavaScript Factory for Visual Studio 2008.

The server component is code-complete but documentation isn't finished yet. Won't take long to complete though. If you are interested in this solution then go to the product page and download the documentation to get a first impression. The product page also contains information about how to obtain an evaluation license, in case you want to try it out.

The CRM 4.0 Metadata Cache - Part 2

2009-09-15T14:00:00+01:00

As I had some work to do recently it took much longer to complete this article, though the implementation was finished a long time ago. I have attached the code to this article and you can download it by clicking the download button in the top left corner.

The implementation uses two main classes, the CrmOrganizationMetadataCache and the CrmMetadataCache. CrmOrganizationMetadataCache is used to cache the metadata of one organization. CrmMetadataCache manages multiple organization caches, which is a requirement for any solution supporting multi-tenancy.

The implementation supports a variety of options. I included a wish list in the previous article:

It must provide an organizational cache.
It must be capable to deal with multiple organizations to support multi-tenancy.
It should give a choice between read-all-at-once and a lazy-loading approach.
It should never request more data than needed. For instance, if you request an entity with attributes and relationships and the attributes were already retrieved, then only relationships will be loaded and the result is merged into the existing cache.
It must be thread-safe. This is very important for server-side applications, where multiple users will call your code in parallel. The cache will be defined as a static member in your implementation, but static members are not thread-safe by default. Intelligent synchronizing of requests is important for a good performance.
It must have methods to persist itself. Saving a cache to disk and loading it when the application starts again is much faster than requesting the data from CRM again.
It must have the ability to check for updated metadata and to clear the cache if the metadata was changed. As this is not required by all applications, appropriate settings have to be available.
Helper classes must exists for easy language management, though this can be implemented at various places. A short explanation: when reading the metadata you are running under a certain user account. This user account (systemuser) is used by CRM to retrieve the user's language settings. All UserLocLabel properties in the returned metadata contain the localized labels for this user. When you cache the metadata and simply user UserLocLabel to access display names, then all users using a different language will be somewhat disappointed. Instead of using UserLocLabel you have extract the appropriate label from the LocLabel collection. For that to work you need to retrieve the user settings first and use the language settings as an argument into the LocLabels array. It isn't too complex, but worth to be put into a helper class.

With the exception of the last item in the list all features are available.

I cannot guarantee that the code is free of errors and I also don't say that it's perfect. But I added a lot of comments to make it easy to understand. Feel free to use and enhance it.

Stunnware Tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - Version 4.5.27

2009-08-26T21:00:00+01:00

I did a lot of work on the Stunnware Tools application recently and released a new version today. Did the same last week as some kind of interim build but the new version is (of course) much better than the old one. Here's a list of changes I did in the last two weeks:

The CRM 4.0 Metadata Cache

2009-06-17T23:00:00+01:00

I don't know about you but I'm using the CRM metadata in almost all of my applications. It may be as simple as the need for an object type code and can be as complex as implementing some intellisense features. Besides some really basic programs I always find myself using the metadata service.

Of course I have created a bunch of wrapper classes for CRM and some of them implement a metadata cache. This, or probably the next article will include the entire project implementing the metadata cache. Before that I want to write about why a metadata cache is useful and what features it needs to be reusable.

The most basic implementation of a metadata cache is this:

static CrmMetadata[] RetrieveAllMetadata(MetadataService service, MetadataItems itemsToRetrieve) {
   RetrieveAllEntitiesRequest request = new RetrieveAllEntitiesRequest()
   {
      MetadataItems = itemsToRetrieve,
      RetrieveAsIfPublished = false
   };

   RetrieveAllEntitiesResponse response = (RetrieveAllEntitiesResponse) service.Execute(request);
   return response.CrmMetadata;
}

It just retrieves the entire metadata at once, which can then be used to build internal dictionaries for fast access. This is easy and if your application doesn't have to check for changes in the metadata you can use it without problems. Retrieving the entire metadata takes a long time though and can dramatically slow-down the startup sequence of your application. To know how long it takes, I created a simple test method calling the above code with different parameters:

MetadataItems[] itemList =
{
   MetadataItems.All,
   MetadataItems.EntitiesOnly,
   MetadataItems.IncludeAttributes,
   MetadataItems.IncludePrivileges,
   MetadataItems.IncludeRelationships,
   MetadataItems.IncludeAttributes | MetadataItems.IncludePrivileges,
   MetadataItems.IncludeAttributes | MetadataItems.IncludeRelationships,
   MetadataItems.IncludePrivileges | MetadataItems.IncludeRelationships,
   MetadataItems.All
};

XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(typeof(EntityMetadata[]));

foreach (MetadataItems itemsToRetrieve in itemList) {

   Console.Write(itemsToRetrieve + ": ");
   DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now;
   CrmMetadata[] allEntities = RetrieveAllMetadata(service, itemsToRetrieve);
   TimeSpan time = DateTime.Now.Subtract(startTime);
   int bytes;

   EntityMetadata[] entities = new EntityMetadata[allEntities.Length];
   for (int i = 0; i < allEntities.Length; i++) {
      entities[i] = (EntityMetadata) allEntities[i];
   }

   StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

   using (StringWriter w = new StringWriter(sb)) {
      s.Serialize(w, entities);
      bytes = sb.Length;
   }

   Console.WriteLine("{0}ms - {1}KB", (int) (time.Ticks / 10000), bytes >> 10);
}

Filtered Views for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - v4.1.8

2009-06-09T21:00:00+01:00

Since creating the first sample on how to use advanced find queries in CRM forms almost two years ago I worked on this topic from time to time and finally created a ready-to-use product recently. Today I posted an updated version and the product slowly moves into a direction that I like. And of course I hope that you like it too.

I think that the most basic reason for trying it out in the beginning was the limitation of having only one associated view. When looking at the contact list in an account I do not want to include the customer attribute, because that will always show the account I'm currently in. But when looking at a marketing list displaying contacts, then it totally makes sense to show the parent customer field. With multiple associated views this wouldn't be a problem, but so far this feature doesn't exist.

After having worked with the Filtered Views add-on for several months now myself, it felt it was time to enhance it. It already gave me multiple associated views, but I needed some extra functionality. I do use CRM to track the invoices and payments of Stunnware. CRM isn't an accounting system at all, but it is one of the best ways for me test certain limits and create more ideas. There is not too much to say about invoices and payments: each invoice should have at least one payment. If it does not, then the invoice isn't paid. Pretty simple.

An invoice can have multiple payments, though usually zero or one. It is a typical 1:many relationship and therefore an associated view exists:

Stunnware Tools 4.4.23 released

2009-05-12T21:00:00+01:00

I don't know if you are familiar with this feeling: the application runs fine in general and it does what it's supposed to do. But when using your own application on a daily base, you find a lot of things annoying and suddenly it doesn't look as good as some time ago. Long running tasks are blocking the UI, preventing you to do edit the sitemap just because the metadata cache is built. And at some time you wonder if the blue skinning was the best choice and look for alternatives. And then you go back to your implementation and feel that it has to be reworked in some areas...

I worked a lot on the Stunnware Tools Framework in the last two months and even took the time to make new screenshots for the help file so that it now matches the look and feel of the application. I added an ISV.Config editor and a Sitemap editor (don't expect graphical stuff, but it allows you to easily load, edit, validate and save these customizations). I also changed major parts of the application to a multi-threaded model, so that time-consuming processes are now running in the background - mostly. There are still some places where the UI is blocked, but as that annoys me as well, I'm going to fix it.

And of course here's the greatest feature of all: choose your own skin! Ok, that isn't a big feature and I always have to laugh when someone advertises such a great enhancement, but it was really easy to implement. That is a bad statement from a sales perspective, but I'm still a developer. It took me about 30 minutes to implement, so I think that "easy" is a proper term. Here are some impressions:

Filtered Views for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - Beta

2009-03-23T13:00:00+01:00

I have been working on the Filtered Views add-on for quite a while and today it is available for public testing. The add-on is based on an article I wrote almost two years ago and you can use this article to create this solution on your own. Because of that, the price of the add-on is rather cheap.

What are Filtered Views?

Filtered Views are a concept to show data in a view that is filtered on some other data. For instance, let's look at the default history view of a contact:

New aggregate in Fetch XML - CountColumn / Update for the Stunnware Tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

2009-03-11T16:00:00+01:00

I read an article today describing a new aggregate in Fetch XML. It's named countcolumn and similar to the count aggregate. However, instead of simply doing a COUNT(*), countcolumn returns the number of records having a value and you can also specify the distinct attribute.

Here are the main differences:

The count aggregate

This is what we have used in the past and was the only aggregate available in Fetch XML. It executes the following SQL query:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS 'citycount' FROM Account

The countcolumn aggregate

This is the new aggregate with the same parameters as before. The resulting query is different though:

SELECT COUNT(address1_city) AS 'citycount' FROM Account

The countcolumn aggregate with the distinct option

When used with the distinct attribute, the SQL query is changed accordingly:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT address1_city) AS 'citycount' FROM Account

Stunnware Tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 updated

I have long awaited a second aggregate and hope there are more to come. I have already updated the Stunnware Tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to support the new countcolum aggregate.

Problems when importing customizations on a CRM 4.0 system with Update Rollup 2

2009-02-20T23:00:00+01:00

I got the second email today stating that relationship names change when importing customizations into a CRM 4.0 system with Update Rollup 2 applied and after trying myself and narrowing down the problem, I have to say that the Filtered Lookup is not supported on a CRM 4.0 installation with Update Rollup 2 installed. Please read the entire article to see if it can affect you.

When importing the Filtered Lookup customization file, either by using the Filtered Lookup Configuration Manager or by importing the customization file through the CRM web client, into an organization where the Filtered Lookup customizations have not been present before and the CRM Server you are using has the Update Rollup 2 installed, then relationship names are renamed during the import process.

Why the Irish people should say NO to the Lisbon Treaty

2009-02-17T22:00:00+01:00

I really would like to write more about CRM related stuff, but a lot of things have been said already and CRM 5 isn't here today. That's not the main reason though.

While the several states of the United States of America say NO to a government that became corrupt, arrogant and violent, the EU is still trying to build the same kind of monster, that the several states are now trying to get rid of. I hope they are doing well and wish them all the best on their way. Let freedom and liberty reign again.

The European government prepared the European Constitution in early 2000 and it was meant to be in effect in 2006. However, it had to be ratified in all member states, 25 at that time. 18 states voted yes and 2 voted no. Because of that, the 5 remaining states weren't asked anymore. Now let's tell it different: From the 20 states having voted, how much of them did a referendum? You might guess it: 2. And who said no? Yes, exactly these two states. To be more specific, it was the Netherlands and France. The people in these countries had a chance to express their opinion and said NO! People in all other 18 countries where not even asked, but that seems normal these days.

Because of the failed approach with the European Constitution, the EU government or whoever makes these ideas decided to give it another try and therefore created the Lisbon Treaty, which is more or less the same as the European Constitution that already failed. Nevertheless, they tried it a second time in 2008 and meanwhile the EU had grown to 27 states. Because of the bad experiences with the failed approach before, the EU decided that asking people is a bad thing in general.

The people in 26 out of 27 states were not asked!

This is not a joke. As most of you know, I live in Germany and there are about 82 million people living here. We were not asked. It was just decided by our politicians and I'm sure that most of them didn't even know what they voted for. The Lisbon Treaty more or less gives all power to the European Commission and its president. Neither the commission nor the president is elected by us, the people. We vote for the European parliament, but that parliament doesn't have any legislative power. They also do not choose the members of the commission. What they can do is more or less having ideas and making suggestions to the commission. SUGGESTIONS!

Meanwhile in New Hampshire ... 33 U.S. States already are, are now claiming, or are planning for declaration of sovereignty

2009-02-03T21:00:00+01:00

If anyone is still believing that everything is fine or will be fine later this year or in 2010 without major changes, then I invite you to read the resolutions of the State of New Hampshire made in 2009:

HCR1	LSR Number: 278 View Bill Text	urging congress to withdraw the United States from the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.
HCR2	LSR Number: 217 View Bill Text	endorsing the National Health Insurance Act.
HCR3	LSR Number: 406 View Bill Text	recommending a statement of principles on international trade.
HCR4	LSR Number: 827 View Bill Text	supporting the Basel Convention on the international shipment of hazardous waste.
HCR5	LSR Number: 634 View Bill Text	urging Congress to enact a system of voluntary public funding for all federal elections.
HCR6	LSR Number: 274 View Bill Text	affirming States' rights based on Jeffersonian principles.
HCR7	LSR Number: 615 View Bill Text	in support of teen dating violence education.
HCR8	LSR Number: 405 View Bill Text	urging the President and Secretary of Defense to withdraw all New Hampshire national guard troops from Iraq in the absence of a valid and subsisting Congressional mandate for such service, and withholding the consent of the governor and New Hampshire state legislature from any further deployment of the New Hampshire national guard to Iraq in the absence of such mandate.
HCR9	LSR Number: 621 View Bill Text	urging the United States Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
HCR10	LSR Number: 481 View Bill Text	urging the federal government to withdraw the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement.