Accessing Data with LiteDb

In my last post I talked about how easy it was to create a database with LiteDb.

But accessing your data is even easier.

To start off, assuming we have no document (i.e., structure) associated with our data – we can create a generic table on the fly using the built in BSonDocument structure.

In this example, I first use my database to get a collection of documents under “FirstTable”.  If it’s your first time creating this document, don’t worry, it’ll be created for you, so no need to do any “CREATE” mumbo jumbo.

var FirstTable = database.GetCollection("FirstTable");

Now I’m going to create some data.  The simplest, most brain-dead way to do this is to create a Dictionary, make some columns and give them whatever values I want that are of type BsonValue

Dictionary<string, BsonValue> docs															
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Getting Started with LiteDB

Every project you do will have data and eventually you’re going to need to store that data somewhere.

And config files are such a pain to manage (and also so early 2000s) so as much as possible I try to use a database or some unit of storage.

And like anything you build, once you start building it, it takes on a life of it’s own that you twist and turn and wrench into something useful until one day you look at it and go – maybe storing our configuration in a 25,000 line XML file wasn’t the best idea?

So if it’s going to be a bad idea down the road, why not start doing the right thing from the get go – enter LiteDb.

LiteDb is an incredibly easy to use,

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Bad SDK Error Messages

I love getting these error messages when using the Dynamics SDK!error.PNG

I immediately know where to go to resolve the problem when it happens 🙁

If you are trying to diagnose precisely where the issue is in your code, the “Reason” member won’t have this data – probably because it’s not at the top of the stack and you need to dig deep to see what’s what.

To get to the nitty gritty of what is happening you will need to dig into the InnerFault of the Detail member to see what has really happened.

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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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