Posts in Category: crm 2015

Creating a Custom Interactive button in Dynamics

It’s been awhile since I played with the Ribbon Workbench and I had to re-familiarize myself with it to deploy some custom button functionality to a Dynamics tenant.

If you’re not familiar with the Ribbon Workbench, go download it and bask in it’s glory and time saving capabilities.

Once you install the solution into your Dynamics system, usage is as simple as selecting the solution you want your new button to be deployed to, dragging a button onto the Form toolbar and creating a command object that calls a function in your specified JavaScript file.

Creating the Button

As you can see from the screenshot, my function is called SendMail and called from a library within the provided file.  When I first started coding this button, I added a simple alert() to the

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Improve Query Performance to Oracle

I recently had an issue where we were migrating a large Oracle database into Dynamics which required a significant amount of lookups back to Oracle for synchronization keys between both systems.

When we moved the system between different database environments we started to see the following errors.

“ORA-12801: error signaled in parallel query server P001\nORA-12853: insufficient memory for PX buffers: current 1632K, max needed 80640K\nORA-04031: unable to allocate 65560 bytes of shared memory (\”large pool\”,\”unknown object\”,\”large pool\”,\”PX msg pool\”)”  

As a developer, I get very worried when code changes are required between environments when all other variables stay the same (i.e., database, code, etc).  In this case however, we had been lucky that we had not run into this problem in DEV.

Where I was dynamically constructing the query on the fly, Oracle saw

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A Scaled out CRM Solution Architecture

Recently I started work on a pretty big CRM project and I wanted to apply a more scaled out approach to my solution architecture.  CRM offers a great facility to deploy code in their solutions but when starting a new project you should always ask yourself the following questions before you starting adding entities into your solutions.

  1. What is the frequency of updates that will be requested by the users and to what components?
  2. Are there multiple users contributing to this project?
  3. How big do you expect this project to grow by?
  4. What kind of promotional model is in place for deployments?

I  have found that questions such as these generally drive the overall solution architecture I will put in place on a project.  For instance, if we are working with a client that has

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Creating a New area in CRM 2015 – By Hand

Emphasis on the “By Hand”.  I’d previously blogged about how to modify the Site Map in Dynamics365 with some of the new  ribbon editing features very reminiscent of Ribbon Bench (here for reference Site Maps and Custom Entities – Oh My!) – but recently had the pleasure of having to do this in 2015, with no tools.

The modification of the XML customizations.xml file itself wasn’t too bad on it’s own, where things really became complicated was when I wanted to add an image to my area.

Modifying the Customizations.xml File

To create your new Groups and Areas – check out this post that does a great job of walking you through how to export, modify and import the XML file (along with screenshots).

Adding an Image to your Area

Now where things went

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