Posts in Category: dynamics 365

Working with Business Units and the SDK

When deploying solutions, you can’t include Business Units in your solution file and if you are needing to create many of them, this can be a bit of a hassle.

I recently had this problem where I was working on a project that had many units that I didn’t want to create manually, so I turned my eyes to the SDK in order to take this task from 20 minutes to 1.

The Parent Business Unit

The most important thing with Business Units is to remember their hierarchy.  Irrespective of how you have setup your system, you will always have a top-level unit that everything else inherits from.

When trying to find this unit (to then extend from) all you need to do is query for the businessunit that does not have a parent

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Creating Code Tasks with the Package Deployer

Continuing off of last week’s Package Deployer post I needed to add some extra functionality into our deployment that required the configuration of some steps that we were doing manually but now wanted to be done in a more automated fashion.

The task to accomplish this isn’t too hard and can be done relatively easily.

The first step involves decided “where” you want your code to execute.  In my scenario, I wanted my code to Run after I had deployed all my customizations to the target tenant.  In my example, I am deploying a base configuration after everything has been deployed.  The “this.CrmSvc” is part of the runtime of the Package Deployer code which lets me access the current connection to Dynamics365.
//Implement the Default Configuration.
ValidateConfiguration config = new ValidateConfiguration(this.CrmSvc);
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The Dynamics Package Deployer

I was looking to automate some of my solution deployments for customers to simplify the deployment of solutions into new environments and ensure the right steps were being followed pre and post deployment.

To do this I wanted to leverage the Package Deployer from Dynamics.  There is already some pretty good information on how to get started building your first package, however I ran into a few problems not covered in the documentation.

Cannot Connect to an Dynamics365 instance

There are many articles on this topic as it ranges from TLS to security permissions, however for me, it came down to SDK versions.  I generally work on a number of different instances across many customers and versions so I need to keep my versions strongly in check.  As such, when trying (and

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Bulk Delete with Dynamics365

No matter what project you are on, you are at one point or another going to need to delete data.

Your environment will become polluted and you going through each entity or manually queuing up your own delete jobs will not be worth your time.

To bulk delete your entire environment you can make use of the Bulk Delete API with the following lines of code.

QueryExpression bulkquery = new QueryExpression();
bulkquery.EntityName = entity.LogicalName;
bulkquery.Distinct = false;

BulkDeleteRequest request = new BulkDeleteRequest
{
JobName = String.Format("System Purge Requested for Entity [{0}] - All Records", bulkquery.EntityName),
QuerySet = new[] { bulkquery },
StartDateTime = DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime(),
ToRecipients = new[] { currentUserId },
CCRecipients = new Guid[] { },
SendEmailNotification = false,
RecurrencePattern = String.Empty
};

ExecuteMultipleResponse response = new ExecuteMultipleResponse();
response = (ExecuteMultipleResponse)_svc.CrmService.Execute(multipleRequest);

Of critical importance is the

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File Source Encoding

I’ve been doing some migration from CSV files over the last few months that resulted in some interesting exercises in the cleansing of data before it gets to Dynamics.

For all of this work, the code was written using C# and the Dynamics SDK.

Encoding

I ran into a number of encoding problems in transferring data from the files into Dynamics. Initially, I thought Dynamics could not handle the character set but on closer inspection, it was the code that wasn’t loading it properly.  I tried a number of different Encoding formats but the one that addressed all scenarios as using the Encoding.Default and let the system decide which to use and when.

Therefore, when loading the data, my initial delimited looked as follows;
var data = File.ReadAllLines(file, Encoding.Default).Select(a => a.Split('\n').ToList());

Delimiters

Since all the data

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