Monthly Archives: April 2016

Design patterns: Iterator and Strategy

Was looking at the “strategy” and “iterator” patterns today. They are both operational/behavioral patterns, which makes them different from the creational patterns like the Factory Method, for instance. What’s interesting is that they might not be that different when it comes to the implementation. It’s the usage which makes them different. Strategy pattern is about… Read More »

Business Analysis: Reading BABOK

While reading BABOK, I came across the following requirements classification – what’s interesting, I worked with quite a few business analysts, however, many of them would not be able to clearly explain the difference between business requirements and functional requirements. The information below is for my reference, then. Not that it becomes absolutely clear what… Read More »

Visionaries – who are they

There are people who inspire, who seem to know what they are doing, and in whose presence you start seeing the picture. We call them visionaries. Somehow, I was wondering what differentiates visionary people from others. And, then, I realized that, while talking about this quality of the human beings, we often use it in an… Read More »

Dynamics CRM: Adding a filter to the lookup

Here is a short code sample on how to add a pre-search filter to the lookup function onLoad() { Xrm.Page.getControl(…).addPreSearch(function () { addPreSearchFilter(); }); } function addPreSearchFilter() { var filter = “<filter type=’and’>” + “<condition attribute=’…’ operator=’not-null’/>” + “</filter>”; Xrm.Page.getControl(…).addCustomFilter(filter); }

Design patterns in the real life: abstract factory and factory method

There are two design patterns which are called “factory” patterns: factory method and abstract factory. They are called factories because they produce something. The interesting thing is that there are other creational design patters which are called differenctly, but they still produce something, so, just following this logic, all those patterns could be called factories.… Read More »

Handling N:N relationships in Dynamics CRM plugins

Here is a quick and dirty example of how a plugin could be created to handle N:N associations. A plugin like this would need to be registered for the “Associate” message of “any” entity: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Threading.Tasks; using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client; using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk; public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider) {   IPluginExecutionContext context… Read More »

So, why is XRM awesome?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to say that XRM is flawless and/or that it fits anything and anyone. Not at all actually. If you gave me 15 minutes, I could keep complaining about missing XRM features for all that time. However, what I’m going to say is that, with the proper application of… Read More »