It Ain't Boring – Page 52 – Writing about the technology to understand it better

Configuration Data Manager updates: improved lookup resolution, longer FetchXml, “applied on” date

Based on the feedback I got so far, there is an updated version of the configuration data manager solution: http://www.itaintboring.com/downloads/ConfigurationData_managed.zip Here is what’s included into this update: You can use more than 2000 characters for the FetchXml When importing configuration data, all non-existing references will be removed. You can still get the lookups assigned… Read More »

Dynamics Configuration Data Manager 1.0 – add configuration data to your solutions!

There are various tools out there we can use to move configuration data from one Dynamics environment to another, but what if we could add data directly to our solutions? So that there would be no need to run XrmToolBox, package deployer, SSIS, Scribe, or other tools in order to get our base data,… Read More »

PackageDeployer – failed to load the import configuration

When trying to deploy a package created using the PackageDeployer tool, you may run into this error: “Failed to Load the Import Configuration : Config File Missing” The error is, actually, self-explaining.. in a way. Every package has two components: there is a dll, and there is a package folder. In order to deploy the… Read More »

When a security issue is not a breach but still a pesky bug

What if you think you can update a record, and there are all the indications that you can, yet you try to change something and it just does not work? In the example below(which I’ve originally discovered in 8.2.2, though the screenshots below are from 8.2.1), my test user seems to have “write” permissions,… Read More »

Dynamics: Drawing activity sequence diagram

For the reasons not clear to myself, I was looking at the js-sequence-diagram library (https://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams/), and it occurred to me that I might probably use such a diagram to display the sequence of activities on the entity form. And indeed.. here is what I ended up with: If you wanted to try it yourself,… Read More »

Entity ownership type: Business Unit

What the heck am I talking about? “Business Unit” ownership!? That’s not even a thing: That’s more or less what I replied in the community forums to somebody who was asking about “business unit” ownership. And yet, it does exist, even if it’s not something you can set up for your own custom entities:… Read More »

Invalid User Authorization error

Was trying to enable data encryption in Dynamics and the next thing I knew there was an error message: Invalid User Authorization The user authentication passed to the platform is not valid. It’s a rather vague message to say the least, so a quick google search revealed some links but no definitive answers. Lucky for… Read More »

Dynamics Portals: Aligning field labels to the left

When designing a form in Dynamics, we can specify, for each section, how field labels will be aligned. It does not seem to have any effect on how those labels show up on the portal, though, since they would always be displayed on top of the fields: So how do we change label alignment… Read More »

Failed to Generate Excel: An error occurred

I was trying to export data to an excel spreadsheet earlier today and ran into something that I have not seen before: Failed to Generate Excel An error occurred when Dynamics 365 tried to generate the Excel file. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator. This was happening on a seemingly innocent view which… Read More »

Using GetAttributeValue – same result, different meaning. Depending on the context

We can use entity[“<attributeName>”], or we can use entity.GetAttributeValue<T>(“<attributeName>”) The second option won’t produce an exception if the attribute is missing – it will return null instead. It will also return null if the value of that attribute is, actually, null. This may look all right, but there is a difference. So when does… Read More »