Living In Tech

Recently, I had an issue that I needed to overcome.  The problem was that the Dynamics 365 instance I was working on, was integrated with multiple other systems with some long running external processes and possible old data in the UI when a record is open, overriding what the value was set to from the external processes.  What was happening is that on create of a contact, we can have a NULL e-mail.  This is normal behavior.  Our external process would be running and update the NULL e-mail field while the record was open in the UI.  Because the UI hadn't been refreshed and the user made other changes, the e-mail would be blanked out (NULL).  To make sure that the field once populated (yes, this is a business requirement) could not be cleared, I wrote a small pre-operation plugin that does the following:

Check's the plugin context to see if we are trying to update the emailaddress1 or emailaddress2.  If we are trying to update either email address.  Than we check to see if conte…

It is common practice in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to use Business Rules to show and hide fields on a form.  But, with that addition of multi-select option sets, you can't do this.  So the next logical step is to use JavaScript.  There is just one small problem, there is no setVisible() function for multi-selection option sets.  Here are the controls we do have access too, as of this post:

So, how can we dynamically show / hide multi select option sets?  The easiest way is to use a section.  Place a new section on you form.  Then you will need to use JavaScript to get the tab and section by name.  Once you have that, you can dynamically show / hide the section to make the multi-selection option set show and hide.  Here is an example of the JavaScript:

function ShowHide(executionContext) { //Create the form context var formContext = executionContext.getFormContext(); var contactStatus = formContext.getAttribute("Field Name").getValue(); var tabObj = fo…

In my spare time I have been building a .NET 4.5.2 library for the Tibco Scribe Online API.  For one developer this has been a daunting task and I am at the point that I need some help.  I have the library created and need people that can write unit tests to test the code.  The project is 100% open source and I am aiming for it to be a community build.  The project is hosted at GitHub.

This is a BETA release, because I have not created all the unit tests to make sure every single method is bug free.  Make sure to check the wiki on how to implement the code and use the project.  Once we are out of Beta I will create the NUGET package.

Thank you in advance to all that help out.

Recently while creating a plugin for Dynamics 365 v9, I ran into an issue trying to connect to CRM via the tooling connector in my unit test project.  The underlying problem was that the .NET version I was using in my unit test was 4.5.2.  This was preventing me from being able to connect to CRM to create my organization service.  I updated the .NET version on my unit test project to 4.6.1 and was then finally able to connect.  I will also add that I am using the latest nuget package version for Dynamics 365 v9.

For consistence, I updated the plugin project I was working on to .NET 4.6.1.  Locally, everything was working great.  I was able to connect to CRM and make sure that all the methods I had written did what they where suppose to do using test driven development practices.

Then when publishing my plugin via the latest version of the plugin registration tool, I received an error and could not publish my plugin.  The error was due to the .NET version of my plugin project not bein…

Recently I had a requirement where I needed to get related records via a many-to-many (N:N) relationship in Dynamics 365 via a plugin in C#.  During my searching online, I kept coming to posts that involved using query expressions.  I wanted to do this with LINQ for consistence reasons and readability in my code.  I will also add that what I was doing was being done via Associate and Disassociate messages of the plugin.  I won't be reviewing that part of the plugin in this post, but I will just be focusing on the LINQ statement used to get the related records via the N:N relationship.  Here is the example code that I came up with:

public List<Entity> GetRelatedRecords(Guid parentID, IOrganizationService service) { OrganizationServiceContext context = new OrganizationServiceContext(service); List<Entity> oProducts = (from r in context.CreateQuery(RELATIONSHIP_NAME) join eOne in context.CreateQuery(ENTITY_ONE_LOGI…

On June 6th, 2018 Scribe Software was acquired by TIBCO.  Below is the announcement I and other partners received in an e-mail with links to the press release.

"We are pleased to announce that on June 6, Scribe Software was acquired by TIBCO Software. This milestone reflects the increasing strategic importance that Scribe’s product line has with IT organizations and presents great opportunities for Scribe’s partner community.

In the short term, there will be no immediate impact to how you conduct business with Scribe. Your sales and support contacts will all remain the same. Over time, we expect that the combination of Scribe’s best-in-class iPaaS with TIBCO’s enterprise product portfolio, which includes messaging, application integration, API management, and analytics offerings, will provide significant capabilities and opportunities for Scribe’s partner community.

To learn more about the opportunities that lay ahead, read the press release..."