Author Archives: Alex Shlega

Let’s rule the business process.. with a workflow!

I was reading a recent post by Dynamics team – they are talking about different ways to manipulate business process stages in Dynamics 365 there: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/crm/2017/06/16/best-practices-for-automating-business-process-stage-progression-in-dynamics-365/ It’s a great article, and it has some interesting insights. What definitely caught my attention is that, it seems, we should be able to manipulate business process flows using the workflows… Read More »

A closer look at the Organization Insights Solution for Dynamics 365

I was looking at the Organization Insights tonight ( https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt763947.aspx ), and I just realized that it seems to be a very special solution: When looking at that dashboard, don’t you think it would be great if we were able to get access to that information from Web API? Or, possibly, if you could set up some alerts/notifications? Usually, all… Read More »

Plug-ins registered for RetrieveMultiple are not called for FetchXml reports

This is just a quick reminder to anyone thinking of creating a RetrieveMultiple plugin: they are not called for FetchXml reports (apparently, they are not called for the SQL reports either). https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328097.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 Why is it important? Usually, we would use RetrieveMultiple plugin to either modify the query (in the pre-retrieveMultiple) or to do something with the records that have… Read More »

Masked fields in Dynamics 365

If you ever needed to create a password field in Dynamics, you first instinct was, probably, to create a javascript that will somehow encode the value entered into such a field. Luckily, creating such fields is not exactly the most popular requirement so we don’t have to think of this too often. However, when it does happen,… Read More »

Azure Functions and Dynamics

What comes to your mind when you realize you need to extend Dynamics with some server-side code? Plugins? Custom workflow activities? External applications? Those are all great options, but, for many years, they have been the only options available to us. And, yet, they all have limitations. Plugins can’t run on their own. Custom workflow… Read More »

TCS Tools: Expressions Syntax (CRMContext object and Sequence function)

CRMContext is a special object that is available to you in the code expressions, and that provides some core properties / methods you can use to work with Dynamics. Here is an example of a code expression that’s using CRMContext: CRMContext.Target[“name”] = “First Account”; This expression is going to set “name” parameter of the target record… Read More »