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 »

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 »

Dynamics: how process duration is calculated

  When looking at the BPF-enabled entity in Dynamics, we can see process duration there – here is an example: In case you were wondering how the duration (“18 days, 1 hour” in this example) is calculated, here is a diagram: If the process is still active, what will show up in the duration area… Read More »

XperiDo – starting the trial

Before I continue.. I’m not affiliated with XperiDo, and I’m pretty sure they have no idea I am writing this blog post right now. Still, I was looking for a document generation solution, and, since XperiDo seems to have some interesting features, figured I’d try it a few days ago: https://www.xperido.com/support/blog/microsoft-dynamics-crm-2016-document-generation-vs-xperido Not pretending to be… Read More »

Custom indexes and solution upgrades

In the on-prem version of Dynamics, we can create our own custom indexes. And, even though it’s a supported customization (here is a reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328350.aspx ), there is at least one scenario which may fail. Basically, the problem is that custom indexes are not managed by Dynamics, so what it means is that any operation… Read More »