Posts in Category: dynamics 365

Geocoding with Dynamics

I’ve been working on a few projects the last little while that has involved leveraging Geocoding services to augment address data stored in Dynamics.  Where I previously thought that all Geocoding services are created equal, I was quick to learn that they are not and you should definitely do your due diligence in looking into what service you use.

This is an important piece as well, we were focused on using services only and not buying data that needed to be updated every quarter.  Many of the services out there give you a free stack of geocoding requests (based on what you’re doing) that you can most likely throttle down your daily limits and/or take the hit on.

What I found most interesting was to see which platforms had access to which

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Database Errors on Restore into v9

If you’re getting ready to perform an on-premise update by importing new organizations into your existing tenant you might start to get some cryptic database errors on constraints.

The constraints themselves vary, mine was in reference to cndx_PrimaryKey_DiscountType, others I’ve seen were in relation to opportunities.

Whatever the error, you will need to install the 0.3 update to address and fix the issue so you can import the tenant.

When you install the server, this update is not applied by “Getting updates”.

The link to the patch is located here – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4490599/service-update-0-3-for-microsoft-dynamics-365-9-0 – once done, your upgrade and import will succeed.

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Ribbon Work Bench and the Async Service

I ran into an interesting problem this past week in trying to publish some customizations via the RibbonWorkBench to an on-premise Dynamics tenant.

Here is the message we were receiving.

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This led me down a road of checking permissions and seeing what forms I had in the solution I was working, connections being closed, security around using IFD deployments and on and on.

After a day or so, we realized the problem was that the Async Service Account could not write to the CustomizationImport folder on this server.  When we granted the appropriate permissions, the problem was solved.

(One more subtle reason to consider the cloud).

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Formatting Slack Messages from Dynamics365

In creating my messaging application that sent data from Dynamics365 to SLACK, I wanted to get a little fancier and not only send static content but actually embed the link to the actual record with some content to provide context to the user.

I also wanted to do a bit of formatting (bolding and links) which is relatively easy but does not follow HTML notation.  The formatting reference for SLACK is located here.

For my scenario (displaying messages for Leads), I wanted to bold the entity (because this will be used by other ones at some point) and open directly to the record when clicked.

The url format to accomplish this is as follows;

A new *Lead* has been created – <{0}/main.aspx?etc=4&id={1}&pagetype=entityrecord|{2}>

Where the first parameter is my Dynamics tenant, the “etc” value is

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Integrating Dynamics365 with SLACK

On a recent project, we wanted to notify users when new items were added into Dynamics (by third-party systems).  The initial goal was to use email as the delivery mechanism but seeing as how everyone was using SLACK for messaging I decided this would be a better (and much cooler delivery mechanism).

This is my first time working with the Slack API and I have to say it was surprising how easy it was to put together some demo functionality to prove it all out.

First thing you are going to need to do is to create an application.  When you create your application you can then enable features for your application.

For my application, I created two incoming WebHooks that enabled me to post to the my #general channel and send

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