Error when updating a plugin in CRM 2011

When you try to update a plugin assembly you sometimes get an error saying the plugin assembly cannot be updated, the manifest of the plugin….etc…

This most probably could be that you are trying to update the assembly which is in the database. However the same plugin could have been registered in the GAC. Till you take the plugin out of the GAC you will not be able to update the plugin.

Once you have taken it out the plugin assembly would get updated without any issues.

Ignore Blank Values and Inactive Records in Duplicate Detection

This has been an issue, but with CRM roll up 5 this has been rectified.

If you want to do this and it’s not in your CRM 2011 then please check the roll up version. Only with CRM roll up version 5 this comes. However this roll up cannot be uninstalled.

Information about update roll up 5.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2011/10/25/update-rollup-5-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011.aspx

You can download the roll up version 5 from here.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27820

Passing invalid characters with OData queries

Sometimes we face the issue of Odata query not working for some of the data, but for some data it is working fine. When we search a bit more we can find that there is an invalid character in a value which we are passing.

These characters have to be replaced before sending.

There is a good post in Microsoft which states how to do it.

However the’ sign has not been included in this. For this character we have to pass it twice (’’) to work.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa226544%28SQL.80%29.aspx

Copying a workflow in CRM 2011?

Is this possible? The answer to this is yes. There is a way to do this. You need to un publish the workflow and change the type as process template from process.

Then you will be able to create a process using this template. This is really helpful as there are workflows which we have create with a lot of lines. Rather than doing it from the scratch which is a tedious task we can do it like above.

A very good example of this is given in the following site. This has been done for CRM 4.0, but same can be done with CRM 2011.

http://kumar-mscrm40.blogspot.com/2010/06/copying-microsoft-crm-workflow.html