Posts in Category: dynamics 365

Accessing Dynamics Queues Programmatically

I typically still code in Dynamics using LateBound requests.  There have been a few instances where I have switched to Early Bound but I continue to do this for the following reasons

  1. I don’t like dragging around proxies into my code that can change environment to environment.
  2. When not depending on proxies, I feel have more options to downgrade my code into different versions based on what can be discovered.
  3. I get to learn about all the hidden relationships between entities and attributes that gives me a deeper understanding of what lies beneath.

With that said, this week I needed to access some queues in Dynamics and see what was in them.

To do this, I queried Dynamics for my queue based on the name provided.

QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression();
query.EntityName = "queue";
query.ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(true);
query.Criteria.AddCondition("name",															
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Getting Started with the USD

If you have not used the USD in Dynamics365 then you’re missing out.

If you’re stuck on how to get started the process is relatively simple and primarily involves downloading the framework and deploying it to your tenant.

To start, download the require components – you will need the framework geared to your OS as well as the Package Deployer- which are all available here – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50355

If you try to open the USD without running the Package Deployer, you’ll receive the following error.

dynamics2

When you execute the Package Deployer, it will ask you where you want to deploy the USD’s solution files to.

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Simple Calculated Fields In Dynamics365

Calculated fields have been around in Dynamics for a few years now.  Like anything new though, people can be resistant to change because of perceived complexity.

In it’s simplest form let’s create a new entity with two fields that are comprised of whole numbers.

We will then create a new field of type “Calculated”.

DyanmicsFields2The new window that opens enables me to define the formula (with many pre-built formulas included).  In this case, it’s simple addition, new_value1 + new_value2.

Dynamics3When done and

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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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