I'm just looking for a bit of clarity on the correct way to model custom entities and activities in CRM 2011.
I have to model a custom activity which is called a Submission. It is really just a Case with some additional properties.
When creating this in my Solution, is it best practice to base it on the Case Entity and then add the properties, or would it be better to create a new activity instead?
We have other types of activities which are similar, so I would also be basing them on the Case entity if that's the best way to go.
Many thanks,
John
I usually err on the side of creating a new custom entity (or activity), especially if you think you might have "case types" that are significantly different. It isn't fun writing a bunch of javascript that shows/hides fields based on type.
You might pick the one activity type (perhaps Submission) that is most like a "Case" and then create custom activities for the others that are close. But then you'll have subtle differences (the Customer lookup on Case, for example, can be either a Contact or Account, but you can't add your own "Customer" lookup to your custom entities).
Unless you really need something that the built-in Case entity provides that you can't do yourself, my vote would be for new entities (activities) and then just hide the built-in Case entity by security roles.
Related
I have an entity - EntityZ, which has a ParentId where ParentId could be EntityA.Id, EntityB.Id or EntityC.Id. Is it possible to create this in MS Dynamics CRM 2016? If yes, how? I've looked but couldn't find a similar question or any help on the web.
An entity can be the child party in only one full parental relationship. When you are looking for a way to cascade record ownership, deletion a.o. between mutiple parent - child entities you can create configurable cascading relationships.
As Arun Vinoth pointed out you can design your entity as an activity type. However, this may conflict with the semantics of activity records in CRM. Also, doing this would make it possible to associate the child entity to any entity that is enabled for activities.
There’s a trade off to achieve this. Custom entity as Custom Activity
Creating custom entity EntityZ as custom activity and EntityA, B, C can act as parent.
EntityA or B or C can be chosen as RegardingObjectId of EntityZ.
This has security limitation like EntityZ will be visible to everyone as this will be listed like other activities (Email, Phonecall, Task, etc)
I think it is worth nothing that Dynamics 365 does contain and out-of-box "polymorphic" customer field.
This field can link to either an Account or Contact:
And while it can be kludgy, another option would be to create 3 lookups and only populate one. Once one is populated you could hide the other two. Or, you could have a "Parent Type" option set to determine which lookup to show.
It would be a bit messy to show three lookups in a view, with only one populated, so you might also want a Parent Name text field in to which you could concatenate the type and name. You could use a workflow to populate it, and then use it in views and reports.
When creating an MVC application with a "Create" view for a particular entity and I want to relate it to another entity I could use a dynamic drop down menu.
However when the possible items is larger than 10 (for example) the drop down does not seem to offer the best user experience.
What is the recommended way to handle the input of a relationship between entities? A textbox that validates against the possible entities?
A textbox that validates against the possible entities?
That is pretty much the answer. The general idea would be to have a controller method that takes a query string and checks against the list of valid entities and returns the entities that match the query. The user can then choose from that filtered list.
You don't have to build it from scratch if you don't want to. Take a look at something like https://github.com/twitter/typeahead.js. There is also https://select2.github.io. However, there are probably lots of choices for that type of control.
It`s seems that the best place to implement validation is as close as possible to the database, so when I use entity framework the nearest objects are the entities, in my case the POCO entities.
The reason for that is that if I want to reuse this POCO entities, the validation is implemented in the POCO objects and then there are less posibilities to insert worng data in the database.
this also avoid that someone try to insert incorrect data in the databse creating another application, or because he does not implement the validation. So it is more secure.
One way to do that is using partial classes that extends the POCO entities and that implements the IValidatableObject interface and return a list of validationresult.
But other way is the following. I have a common assembly that has the following:
One interface that declare the methods that need to implement the repositories.
The POCO entities that will be used by the repositories.
One class with utilities, such as copy entities and methods to validate the data of the entities.
Then I can create many repositories that use different versions of EF or another technology and all of them use the common assembly. This repositories implements the validation using the methods in the common library.
In this case I implement the validation only once. The only problem is that the repositories need to call the methods to validate the data.
But there are advantages in this way, from my point of view. For example, I can validate the data of the entities depending on the type of the operation. For example, if I am adding a new record and the primary key as an autonumeric, if the ID is not 0, then I can throw an exception, or if I try to delete a register when the ID is 0, then I don't need to send the command to the database.
So this second solution solves the problem to implement the validation as close as possible to the database, bacause is used in the repository, that is the element that access to the database, but has the problem that if some developer creates a new repository and not use the validation methods, I can have incorrect data in the database.
So my question is if the best option is to use validation with partial classes or to use a common library and the validation is implemented in the repositories, that is really what the users will use.
Thanks.
OK - phew, big question. My opinion is that the APPLICATION DOMAIN of the application is the boss of everything. The database is just an add-on service. So, the application domain should ultimately validate ALL objects that are being SENT somewhere. No need to validate object coming out of the DB because they were validated going in.
As an example, what if you were creating some object that needed to be sent off to a web service and it needed validation. Lets say it was never going near the database or the repositories. Once the DOMAIN business objects have been validated, they can then be sent for persistence or anywhere else.
Another thing to consider is what you mean by validation. Does it mean the datatypes are correct? Does it mean the business object is valid? Does it mean the business object is valid in the given context? It could mean all or only some of these things.
As an example, what if your system allows users to partially update records (common with very long input forms). The business object may only become valid when ALL the required data is captured, but the database allows persistence of "partial" data. In other words, you can save the business object to the database although it is not valid for further processing yet. etc etc....
I want to modify the view of 'Activity' entity, opened the view and try searching for edit filter criteria option and it's not available on view form.
please see below
Can you please help to advice me on how I can add filter criteria for this view above. Or how to make it visible the option 'Edit filter criteria' on the form of a view.
Any suggestion will be much appreciated. Welcome for any feedback...
I don't know any way to do that, but you can do your custom views and for example change the default view for that entity. With custom view you can change everything.
See here step by step: http://www.powerobjects.com/blog/2008/08/11/creating-and-editing-views/
What you want is impossible to achieve. Pedro's suggestion is your only option. Create your own Activity view, and then you can create your own filters. You definitely cannot create your own Associated Views. Public Views are the only ones you will have a hope of creating or modifying, and in this particular case, you are still restricted.
There are various places spread throughout CRM where you will run into problems like this, where an entity, view, or field is "locked down". This is the cost of starting with platforms like CRM which are a blackbox that only offer customization up to a certain point.
The problem in this specific case has to do with the nature of activities and the various activity types. Under the hood, there really is not a traditional record type for Activities. The Activity entity is really a "pointer entity" (note the internal name "activitypointer"). Activities really point to other entity types (in this case Activity Types) such as Email activities. The Email entity is more of a traditional entity which you can run standard queries against--but even still that is "locked down".
This additional layer of complexity makes dealing with Activities programmatically more difficult (ex. querying the data, modifying the data via a plugin/SQL, etc.) and, in this particular case, makes even the most basic customizations impossible.
I've made a custom entity that will work as an data modification audit (any entity modified will trigger creating an instance of this entity). So far I have the plugin working fine (tracking old and new versions of properties changed).
I'd like to also keep track of what entity this is related to. At first I added a N:1 from DataHistory to Task (eg.) and I can indeed link back to the original task (via a "new_tasksid" attribute I added to DataHistory).
The problem is every entity I want to log will need a separate attribute id (and an additional entry in the form!)
Looking at how phone, task, etc utilize a "regardingobjectid", this is what I should do. Unfortunately, when I try to add a "dataobjectid" and map it to eg Task and PhoneCall, it complains (on the second save), that the reference needs to be unique. How does the CRM get around this and can I emulate it?
You could create your generic "dataobjectid" field, but make it a text field and store the guid of the object there. You would lose the native grids for looking at the audit records, and you wouldn't be able to join these entities through advanced find, fetch or query expressions, but if that's not important, then you can whip up an ASPX page that displays the audit logs for that record in whatever format you choose and avoid making new relationships for every entity you want to audit.
CRM has a special lookup type that can lookup to many entity types. That functionality isn't available to us customizers, unfortunately. Your best bet is to add each relationship that could be regarding and hide the lookups that aren't in use for this particular entity.