Dynamics 365: Modern Advanced Find

I have been used to using Advanced find (now can be referred as Legacy Advanced find screen) since 2005 and this screen is/was pretty much back bone of dynamics system since first release of dynamics.

Legacy Advanced Find

Recently Microsoft have announced introducing Modern Advanced find for Model Driven App  which will pretty much replace existing advanced find screen.

To enable this feature, go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environments and select relevant environment and then go to feature and enable this feature as shown in screen print below.

Enable Modern Advanced Find

Creating new view

For creating new view, click on Data-verse Search box and click on “Search for rows in a table using Advanced filters” link

D365 Creating a New view

On next screen select relevant table.

This table list is limited to only the ones specified with in Model Driven App so this is major change as currently in legacy Advanced find screen user can search on any tables they can access based on their Permission.

select Table for View

Once selected relevant Table and then on next screen Create relevant filter and click on Apply  

View Filter

After this, click on Save as new view and on next screen give relevant view name for this.

Saving New View

After clicking on Save, new Personnel view will be created against this table.

Amend Existing view

To amend existing personnel view, select relevant view and select Edit Columns (to Add/ Remove columns) or Edit Filter (to change view criteria)

Amend Existing View

Delete/Hide or Change View Name

Click on “Manage and share views” link which will allow user to Edit view name, user can hide and delete not requirement view as well from this screen.

Delete/Hide View

This allows configure sorting of views as well.

If as an Administrator if you want to apply this settings for multiple user then use XRMToolbox Plug-in called “User Views Display Settings” for this (refer screen print below)

XrmToolBox

Note: –

Even though after enabling Modern Advanced Find, Legacy Advanced Find icon is not longer visible but if some user still wants to access, they can access via following URL. (Replace CRMURL and APPID for your relevant environment)

https://CRMURL/main.aspx?appid=APPID&pagetype=advancedfind

Power Automate Flow: Change Flow Owner After Creation

Problem

When working on cloud flow, just realized that once cloud flow create you can not change owner after creation on power platform.

We had cloud flow for which we want to change current owner.

Image 1: Sample Flow screen

While trying to change the owner, clicking on the Edit screen takes us to the next screen where we can add a new owner, but we cannot amend the original owner.

Image 2: Sample Flow Owner screen

Resolution

If you can log in to relevant data-verse (dynamics 365) Environment and do advanced find and search for relevant processes.

Once you locate the relevant process (i.e. flow) and then from this screen you can assign to a different owner. (ensure you assign to owner which got correct permissions)

Image 3: Advanced Find screen

Note: – Remember this only changes owner if there are relevant connection references then they needs to be manually updated..

Hope this helps..

XrmToolBox: AutoNumberUpdater : New Tool

Recently we had a scenario where we had to create an auto number field on an existing table (or entity) in data verse.

so when you create a new auto number field all existing records will have this field value as Null and will not be populated.

To resolve this issue, I have created the following new XrmToolBox Tool called “AutoNumberUpdater”.

To Install this toll, open XrmToolBox Tool Library and selected “AutoNumberUpdater” and then press Install

XrmToolBox: Tool Library

Once installed, open this tool and connect to the relevant data version environment.

Following are brief steps on how to use this tool.

XrmToolBox : AutoNumberUpdater

Step 1: Select Solution from the solution dropdown

Step 2: After Solution is selected, the system will show you all entities which are in the currently selected solution so pick the relevant entity (or table) where the auto number column resides.

Step 3: Once Entity is selected, it will populate all available auto number attributes (or fields) in the attribute dropdown list. Selected relevant attributes for which data needs to be populated.

Step 4: once attribute is selected, system will show auto number format in Next number field and also enabled “Fix Auto Numbers” Button

Step 5:  Once you are ready to update data, press “Fix Auto Numbers” Button which will show a running log of records as shown in screen prints below.

XrmToolBox : AutoNumberUpdater : Running Log

I hope this helps…

Notes: –

1. This is tool inspired from already existing tool called Auto Number Managed by Jonas Rapp (https://jonasr.app/) which allow you to create new auto number field on dynamics 365 (or data-verse) table
2. If you want to learn more about data verse auto number then refer this article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/autonumber-fields

CRM : Rescheduling the Update Contract States job

Update Contract States job is CRM 2011 (also for CRM 4.0) system job which runs daily and change the contract status based on contract start date and end date (i.e. change contract from Invoiced to active and from Active to expired).

One of customer’s CRM organization has this job running 10 PM at night and wanted to change this job on particular time (very early in the morning) to make sure contract status are up to date when users starts using CRM system.

There is job editor provided by MS to reschedule CRM system jobs but this does not include this specific job.

so following are steps we undertook with the help of CRM parter/MS support to reschedule this particular job in CRM system.

Step 1: run the following query to find the current Jobs in the relevant CRM organization. (note down the AsyncOperationid returned from this query as we will be using this in next step)

select AsyncOperationid,RecurrenceStartTime,postponeuntil,StatusCode, RecurrencePattern from AsyncOperation WHERE
Name = 'Update Contract States job'
and
StatusCode =10
and RecurrencePattern is not null

following quick details regarding important columns in this table.

RecurrencePattern is used to describe frequency and interval of the system jobs and please refer this article for more information on regarding this.

Postponeuntil is datetime field and indicate when this job will run next time. And it is UTC date meaning if this field contains “2012-10-23 09:08:00.000” and if your time zone is GMT + 1 then this job will run next time on “2012-10-23 10:08:00.000”

RecurrenceStartTime is also UTC datetime field which will be used to set next runtime of job, date part of this field is not important as long as it is set in the past.

Step 2: so using noted down AsyncOperationid in step 1 run following query to update recurrencestarttime, postponeuntil for this Update Contract States job .


update AsyncOperation set
RecurrenceStartTime = '2012-10-22 09:08:00.000',
postponeuntil = '2012-10-23 09:08:00.000'
WHERE AsyncOperationid = '5EB24ECB-60ED-4F59-801D-A6C19465C4D8'


So as per above update, this job will run at 9:08 AM (GMT time) in the morning every day.after job run if you verify the details then it would look as follows. So as you can see system will update postponeuntil (next run time) to next day (24th October) after this job run today (on 23th October).

****Important Notes regarding above change****
above change is unsupported so make sure you apply this change to Dev, Test environment before applying this to Live environment. Also make sure you take back up of database before doing this change.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

How to find records created on weekends or created on after working hours

Recently one of our customer asked how to find cases or emails created on Saturday/Sunday or cases created after normal working hours (i.e. after 18 PM?).

Of course this CRM system had email router which were creating those email and automatic case were created based on this.

I did try to so this using advanced find but it is not possible to get the desired result and try to do this using Excel features and it was really easy, following quick steps for the same using Excel.

Step 1: Export data to excel, so do advanced find on CRM (CRM 4.0 or CRM 2011) to retrieve relevant data and then export that to excel.

Step 2: once exported add new columns, let’s say those columns are called “DAY”, “Time HOUR” and “Time MIN”.

Step 3: put formula to retrieve values for those columns, as shown below. Please note that column G is created on date and based on this column G following formula are created. Please change column name as per your requirement.

COLUMN I (DAY) :

=IF(WEEKDAY(G2)=1,"SUNDAY",IF(WEEKDAY(G2)=2,"MONDAY",IF(WEEKDAY(G2)=3,"TUESDAY",IF(WEEKDAY(G2)=4,"WEDNESDAY",IF(WEEKDAY(G2)=5,"THURSDAY",IF(WEEKDAY(G2)=6,"FRIDAY",IF(WEEKDAY(G2)=7,"SATURDAY",)))))))

COLUMN J (Time Hour):
=HOUR(G2)
COLUMN K (Time Hour):
=MINUTE(G2)

Step 4: after apply this formula to all rows and you will get following result.

Step 5: you can apply standard excel filter to return only cases created on weekends (Saturday/Sunday) or cases created after 18 PM easily.

Hope this helps…

Cheers,
Mayank:)

CRM 2011 views: getting more than 5000 records

If you access any CRM views for example account page and if it got more the 5000 records you will see “5000+” as shown below.

You can update this limit by running following query again MSCRM_Config database, so IntColumn contains number of maximum records to be run for CRM. If you put value -1 it will retrieve all the records…


Update DeploymentProperties Set IntColumn=-1 Where ColumnName = 'TotalRecordCountLimit'

so IntColumn contains number of maximum records to be run for CRM. If you put value -1 it will retrieve all the records

****Important Notes regarding above change****:
1. Above change is unsupported so make sure you apply this change to Dev, Test environment before applying this to Live environment. Also make sure you take back up of database before doing this change
2. This change might impact performance as well since system will retrieve all the records.

There is another registry key called “TurnOffFetchThrottling” is also there which will allow you to retrieve more than 5000 records in CRM, refer following blog article for more information regarding the same.

http://www.interactivewebs.com/blog/index.php/server-tips/turn-off-microsoft-crm-2011-5000-limit-on-data-retrieval-via-sdk/

but above key is only when call is done in the external SDK (fetchXML) calls only, this will not change data retrieve to be display in Entity Grid, so for account grid will still display “5000+” after applied this registry key change and only above SQL script (i.e. unsupported) can change this behaviour.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM 2011 Chart: Drill Down enable/disable

Recently we noticed few charts in CRM 2011 displays drill down while other does not display drill down for the same.

For example standard Sales Pipe line chart report does not display drill down, after little investigation found that chard is displaying drill down if field used to display data set as Searchable to YES (as shown in the screen print below)

So your chart will display drill down if axis displays a field which got value searchable set to Yes.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM 2011 Queue emails automatic contact creation issue

In CRM 2011, queues functionality is enhanced and changed as lot from CRM 4.0. You can read more about the changes in this article.

This current article is specific to behaviour with regarding to incoming email in to queue in CRM 2011. So if you received email in queue in CRM 2011 and if contact is not recognized by system automatically then it creates new contact automatically.

This is issue for one of customer because they did not want to end having lots of contacts created unnecessarily so we decided to turn off this feature for queues.

Solution

Following are steps to turn off this automatic feature in CRM 2011.

Step 1: Simply log on to CRM 2011 with administrative account (i.e. the account that was used to install CRM 2011 and CRM 2011 email router)

Step 2: go to File -> Options, this should open up Set Personal option page

Step 3: go to Email tab and un-tick option to automatically create records in CRM

Step 4: Click OK, Done!!

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM 2011 Tip: hiding start pane on CRM entities

Few of our users did not like this started pane in CRM 2011 and asking us if we disable this.

User settings

Following steps individual user can do to remove this started pane
Step 1: Go to File -> Options -> General tab
Step 2: un- tick “Show Get started panes on all lists” and click ok

System settings

System admin can switch this setting off for all users by doing following steps.
Step 1: go to Settings -> Administration -> system settings – > General tab
Step 2: set “Show Get Started panes on all lists of all users “ to “NO” and click ok

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM Outlook client Installation issue

One of my colleagues had following issue while installing latest CRM roll up for outlook client.

Installation cannot proceed: Setup cannot continue because a pending restart is required. Restart the computer and then try running Setup again

Please read this article for the solution regarding this.

Hope this helps…

Regards,
MayankP 🙂