You all know the most common usage of the pipelinephase field of an opportunity. It’s the sales funnel chart in sales dashboards.
By default the pipelinephase field is filled with the number of the current business process, followed by its name. But sometimes it stays empty. You can imagine how unhappy the sales guys are about that.

What I found out

It depends on how you create the opportunity. If you create an opportunity through the quickcreate feature, where it does not matter if you use the global “+” sign or the contextual “+” sign of a subgrid to create it, the pipelinephase field will not be filled until you step further in the next phase.

Workaround

Build an asynchronous workflow on opportunities that is triggered on create and fills the pipelinephase field if it is empty.

Below you find a solution to download that contains this workflow. It takes dynamically the phase name of the current business process. It is also an ondemand workflow, so that you can run from a view or advanced find that shows you all open opportunities with an empty pipelinephase field.

Issue reporting

There is already an proposal on CRM-Ideas for this issue. You can find it H E R E. It is already 9 month old and has only 4 votes. My appeal to you, follow the link, sign in and vote for it. The more votes it get, the higher is the attention from Microsoft.

15.12.2016

Ben

One Comment

Limits for custom parameters

Posted in Dynamics 365, and Power Platform

Have you ever asked how many characters you can pass as parameter to a Javascript event handler or to a HTML webresource? I do, because I like to give a consultant or the customer the possibility to pass dynamic values in form of JSON objects or even whole functions without touching my code.

HTML webresource

The limit here is at 1.500 characters.

Javascript event handler

I think there no limit. Really. I made a test with up to 2.400.000 characters without any problems. The only thing that I would mention – do not exaggerate it as I did, because the performance suffers quite a lot.

14.12.2016

Ben

5 Comments

Internet Explorer and promises

Posted in Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Revive

Microsoft shows us on Get started with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Web API (client-side JavaScript) how to create a re-usable function using promises. Between the description and the example is a little note box that points out that Internet Explorer 11 doesn’t implement native promises. Most other browsers support promises natively, IE is the problem child – again.
Microsoft further advises that there are several polyfills and libraries which will implement promises to IE. But they don’t tell you how do this in an effective way.

Detection

As you don’t want to add and load superfluous libraries, you have to detect if the browser has promises implemented. In my first approach I used modernizr. 2KB more just for detection. That is not what I wanted and searched for a plain js solution and found it at stackoverflow.

if(typeof Promise !== "undefined" && Promise.toString().indexOf("[native code]") !== -1)
{
    //Your browser is unsuspecting, paste your polyfill or library here.
}

Agony of choice

Now that we can detect if the browser has implemented promises or not, which polyfill or library should we implement additional? My decision fellt on the smallest possible solution I found – ‘ES6 Promise polyfill’ with only 2KB.

02.12.2016

Ben

One Comment

ImportSequenceNumber field in Dynamics 365

Posted in Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Revive

Today I stumbled over the meaning and purpose of the “ImportSequenceNumber” field in Dynamics 365 (or Dynamics CRM, If you have not got used to it like me).

The ImportSequenceNumber field itself

It’s an integer field that is reachable through the field list in a solution. It is searchable but you are not able to add it to a form.

ImportSequenceNumber field in Dynamics 365

ImportSequenceNumber purpose

Every import in Dynamics 365 is numbered with an ascending number which is globally stored in the “Organization.CurrentImportSequenceNumber” attribute. Every record created during an import gets this number as value for the ImportSequenceNumber field.
By this way Dynamics 365 can show you all records that are created during an specific import or let you delete all records created by an import.

01.12.2016

Ben

Some changes here

Posted in Uncategorized

As a loyal recuring visitor, you may have noticed same changes here in the last week.

I removed the small little image that indicates about which product a blog entry is written.
From time to time Microsoft makes some changes on the logos and they have guideline for its usage and I’m
not interested in taking about care such things anymore, so do without it.
The <-more-> TAG has been removed.
I don’t wan’t to oppress me with my own design rules. Less clicks for you people.
I switched from multilingual entries to English only.
The first time I have only written in German to support and interact with the German community.
Then I added English to reach more people and have a greater audience. At the end there is no interaction,
no matter in which language. So I spare me the double work.

Final words

I think you will profit from the restructuring because I will have less work with creating content and
I’m able to “fast publish” posts because I’m not stick at any layout.

Month: December 2016

Empty pipelinephase on opportunity quickcreate