Conditional Unique Auto Number Sequences in Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM

Conditional unique auto number series

A common request for Auto Numbers in Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CDS/CRM) is to have one number field with different formats and unique sequences based on data on the record or it’s parents.
I call this “Conditional Unique Auto Number Sequences”.

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Create view: Active Contacts in My State

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Common Data Service offer us the querying language FetchXML to retrieve data. Since this is the language used for views saved in the system, we can use FetchXML Builder for XrmToolBox to alter the features of views beyond what is possible using platform features, without making them unsupported.

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Balancing Cool Tech, Usability and TCO

I’m a techie.
I like new, shiny,
cool stuff.

Newest however, usually
costs.
And customers usually like cheap.

Users don’t care about either.
They just want a system that
empowers more than it obstructs.

So how do you find the balance between the three? Is it even possible? Or is it just another
Project Management Triangle?

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No more Export as Unmanaged

Ever since “CRM 2011” Microsoft has been pushing the message that we should have unmanaged solutions only in Development environments. That message is being emphasized even more as we walk into the new Power Platform era.
Ideas have been raised that one day we might not be allowed to import unmanaged solutions to an environment that is not explicitly tagged for Development.

I would suggest completely removing the possibility to export solutions as unmanaged.

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The Milliseconds Are Here!

Ever since I started using the Plugin Trace Log for investigation of my plugins around three years ago, I have wondered why we don’t have timestamps with better granularity than seconds.
As I expressed it in an article from 2017:

Given the CPU power we have today, it is just incomprehensible why we should not get more detail in the timing of plugin execution.
It is like defining my age by saying I was born sometime during the second half of the 20th century.

From A Canary in CRM
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Dynamic content in Auto Numbers for Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM

As the creator of the Auto Number Manager tool in XrmToolBox, I get two questions more than any other questions:

How can I number existing records?

How can I add dynamic content to the numbers?

In a previous article I gave my solution to the first question. I will now dive into the second one and show a simple way of adding dynamic information from the numbered entity and related entities into the numbered attribute.

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