Dynamics CRM - Pages from an external Web App - dynamics-crm

Question

I have an e-commerce back-end fully customizable where I can see my customers' profils and sales. I would to integrate a link under the phone number or the email adress that opens the corresponding contact page on my Dynamics CRM. I've made some research and I saw some URI pattern that might be doing the job but as every entity has its own entity ID (GUID). How can I get the GUID of the entity that matches the phone number (or email) in order to open the contact page with contact displayed in it ? By Dynamics SOAP Web Services ?
Any advice will be appreciated !

Answer 1

Use the web api endpoint to filter the records down. For e.g. in your case customers (accounts/contacts):
Primary keys are always entityname + id (so if you entity is named foo_bar, the entity primary key (id) would be foo_barid).
http://contoso.com/myorganization/api/data/v8.0/accounts?$filter=address1_telephone1 eq '123-456-7890'&$select=accountid
Result:
{
"#odata.context":"http://consoto.com/myorganization/api/data/v8.0/$metadata#accounts(accountid)","value":[
{
"#odata.etag":"W/\"137091357\"","accountid":"12345678-abf1-e511-80d5-00155d3af123"
}
]
}
You can then build a URL which would help users navigate to the record:
http://consoto.com/myorganization/main.aspx?etn=account&pagetype=entityrecord&id=12345678-abf1-e511-80d5-00155d3af159
To use SOAP endpoint, use a library such as SDK.Soap.js or XrmServiceToolKit.js. With CRM roadmap on SOAP endpoints pretty clear (near future depreciation), web api should be the default option going foward atleast.

Answer 2

First of all, which programming language your e-commerce solution uses. That determines your further steps. Or rather CRM access library to choose from.
Basically, you won't have any problems if your back-end written in C#, since SDK for that language is available right away. Rest of the languages more tricky, though, I believe it is possible to find needed library anyway.
Next, your back end should query CRM for needed GUID of the record. Here an example FetchXML query for searching contact by mobilephone number:
<fetch>
<entity name="contact" >
<attribute name="contactid" />
<filter>
<condition attribute="mobilephone" operator="eq" value="555-555-555" />
</filter>
</entity>
</fetch>
Your resulting GUID will be found in contactid field of the result. By this GUID you can open record you need.
Though if you already customizing your e-commerce solution maybe it would make more sense just get all needed information from CRM and show it in your own interface?
This could be beneficial sometimes, since redirecting users to CRM might require passing authorization procedure. And this could slow down your flow.