Develop 1 Limited Blog

I've just published an update to my Multi-Entity Search Solution (after being encouraged by my friend and fellow Dynamics CRM MVP Gus Gonzalez!).

Features:

1. Search across multiple entities at once.
2. Uses the same configuration as the mobile client 'Quick Find' (Settings->General ->Set Up Quick Find). This allows you to select which entities you would like to search across.
3. Virtual Scrolling with new records loaded as you scroll rather than all loaded at once.
4. Shows the primary entity image of returned records (if there is one) in the search results.

In the new version you'll find:

1. A search button added to the top navigation bar* rather than using a Command Bar button.
2. Auto searching as you type the search term
3. Mouse Wheel horizontal scrolling support

*Since there is no supported way of doing this, I've had to do a little DOM shenanigans to get this to work the way Gus wanted!

To try it out you'll need to install the following 2 managed solutions:

• SparkleXrm_0_1_5_managed.zip
• MultiEntitySearch_2_3_managed.zip

If you like this, you might also like to check out my Start Menu Navigation for CRM2013!

@ScottDurow

I once heard someone say that "the great thing about Dynamics CRM is that it just looks after itself" Whilst CRM2013 is certainly very good at performing maintenance tasks automatically, if you have a customised system it is important to Monitor, Monitor, Monitor! There are some advanced ways of setting up monitoring using tools such as System Center but just some regular simple monitoring tasks will go a long way for very little investment on your part:

1) Plugin Execution Monitoring

There is a super little entity called 'Plugin-in Type Statistics' that often seems to be overlooked in the long list of advanced find entities. This entity is invaluable for tracing down issues before they cause problems for your users and as defined by the SDK it is "used by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online platforms to record execution statistics for plug-ins registered in the sandbox (isolation mode)."

The key here is that it only records statistics for your sandboxed plugins. Unless there is a good reason not to (security access etc.) I would recommend that all of your plugins be registered in sandbox isolation. Of course Dynamics CRM online only allows sandboxed plugins anyway so you don't want to put up barriers not to move to the cloud.

To monitor this you can use advanced to show a sorted list by execution time or failure count descending:

If you spot any issues you can then proactively investigate them before they become a problem. In the screen shot above there are a few plugins that are taking more than 1000ms (1 second) to execute, but their execution count is low. I look for plugins that have a high execution count and high execution time, or those that have a high failure percent.

2) Workflow & Asynchronous Job Execution Monitoring

We all know workflows often can start failing for various reasons. Because of their asynchronous nature these failures can go unnoticed by users until it's too late and you have thousands of issues to correct. To proactively monitor this you can create a view (and even add to a dashboard) of System Jobs filtered by Status = Failed or Waiting and where the Message contains data. The Message attribute contains the full error description and stack trace, but the Friendly message just contains the information that is displayed at the top of the workflow form in the notification box.

3) Client Latency & Bandwidth Monitoring

Now that you've got the server-side under control you should also look at the client connectivity of your users. There is a special diagnostics hidden page that can be accessed by using a URL of the format:

http://<YourCRMServerURL>/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx

As described by the implementation guide topic, "Microsoft Dynamics CRM is designed to work best over networks that have the following elements:

• Bandwidth greater than 50 KB/sec
• Latency under 150 ms"

After you click 'Run' on this test page you will get results similar to that shown below. You can see that this user is just above these requirements!

You can read more about the Diagnostic Page in Dynamics CRM. You can also monitor the client side using the techniques I describe in my series on Fiddler:

• Part 1: X-Ray vision
• Part 2: Invisibility
• Part 3: Faster than a speeding bullet!
• Part 4: Ice Man

If you take these simple steps to proactively monitor your Dynamics CRM solution then you are much less likely to have a problem that goes un-noticed until you get 'that call'!

@ScottDurow

There are great many new features shipped in CRM2013 SP1 but let's not forget there are some eagerly awaited fixes as well (as described by http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=2941390) Since there has already been plenty of coverage of the new features, I thought I would pick out my top 3 fixes that I've been particularly waiting for…Queue up the charts count-down soundtrack!

In at Number 3: Matching Connection Roles

Connections are a great way of providing users with an overview of a contact's involvement with all areas of your business. Right from within a contact record users can see the roles that the contact has across different record types such as accounts, cases, and opportunities. Roles are specified on each side of the connection and in many cases you need to have the same role on both sides. In CRM2011 this was possible but strangely with CRM2013 the same role could not be specified as the matching role with the issue being described by the KB article as "In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, users are unable to set a Matching Connection Role to the same Connection Role." Up until now the work around was to create a different role but with the same name but I've tested this in SP1 and I'm pleased to report that it now works the same as it did in CRM2011.

New at Number 2: Importing solution fails when plugins attached to custom actions

The addition of custom actions to CRM2013 was fantastic for creating custom server logic that is called from JavaScript. Unfortunately when you attached a plugin to a custom action message and imported a solution containing that plugin it would fail (See the Microsoft Connect article for this issue). I have held back from using this feature up until now due to the pain it created during deployments but now that it is fixed in SP1 I'm going to be making a lot more use of Custom Action plugins!

UPDATE: Actually, the connect item for this issue is not entirely correct - this will be fixed in one of the next Update Rollups of CRM 2013 SP1

…and this Service Pack's Number 1 Fix is: "Found more than one RibbonDiff entity"

This message is likely a very familiar message to anyone who has made customisations to the Ribbon with CRM2011 (as described by http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2503029). The message was shown when importing customisations and was usually down to there being more than one element in the ribbon xml that had been given the same ID. When CRM2013 was released the message started popping up far more frequently. Initially I was worried it was due to an issue with Ribbon Workbench but eventually I tracked it down to the fact that elements were being duplicated when a solution was exported from CRM2013. The Ribbon Workbench resolves duplicate IDs automatically so the issue only caused problems when transferring a solution between environments through an export/import but what was more confusing is that the issue would only happen on the second import. There is a line in the KB article for SP1 that describes the issue as:

"When we import, the import logic creates two values for each entry within the RibbonDifBase. But When we export the application ribbon we do not have any check for this and we export 2 values directly from the DB to the XML. This if imported to a new org will create 4 values in the table RibbonDiffBase. If the solution is imported again to the same org causes an error"

The Microsoft Connect item for this issue is still marked as active but I've tried to reproduce the issue in SP1 and so far so good! Well done Dynamics CRM Product team!

Poptastic!

@ScottDurow