Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Migrating Data To CRM 3.0

It is possible to migrate data from and existing system to CRM database using SQL statements.

Although microsoft recommends us not to use direct SQL statements, this method is easy as we don't have write code to migrate data. But we need to be very careful when we are doing this as we need to populate the references before migrating data.

I don't know whether CRM 4.0 provide a method to insert data to custom entities. CRM 3.0 doesn't provide us this. That is the reason why we have to choose an alternative.

Truncating CRM tables

Is it possible to truncate CRM table data?

The answer is for some it's Yes. you can truncate the extensionbase tables in the CRM cause mostly they contain data and foreign keys. We can truncate these tables.

But we cannot truncate the base tables as they contain the references to other tables. You need to use the delete command to delete data in these tables.

Site map XML

Do you guys now where CRM stores the site map?

Recently I had to check orgnaizationbase entity in the CRM for some reason and i found that it contains a field named Sitemap in the table. When checked the data in this field i found that the current site map is being stored there.

So if anyone wants to check the site map you should check the organizationbase table in the CRM database.

String map entity

This table in the CRM is holding valuable information regarding all the pick lists that we add to CRM. it contains the attributename and the entity object type code with the values that we specify to the attributes.

But probably we don't think that doing a change that is not accurate here would cause the CRM to give the unauthorized access error. Well, it does. Recently we did some data insertions to a CRM server with wrong object type codes and it caused the system to give errors. What we didn't realise is that it caused the system failure. When we deleted those records from the string map entity(Luckily we knew the data we have inserted) CRM started working fine.This was a very good lesson for us and would be for you all out there.

Retrieving Calendar of a Bookable Resource in Dynamics

There are occasions where we need to retrieve working days and working times of a resource in Dynamics grammatically. This is quite possible...