Incorporating Custom Entities into a Plugin (revised)

re: Incorporating Custom Entities into a Plugin (revised)

Mitch Kett — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:05:58 GMT

It has been asked whether or not the SDK can be "overriden" or "completed" in order to work with custom entities (thus getting around using the web ref and not having to use DynamicEntity), and as of right now I am not aware of such a thing. If you are able to make CRM "update" the SDK with custom entity information, it's behavior and usage would be no different than the web ref. In my opinion, it would be best to leave the SDK "as-is" simply because it would not be worth the time and effort to make it behave like the web ref which already exists.

re: Incorporating Custom Entities into a Plugin (revised)

Mitchell Kett — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:50:05 GMT

Apologies for such a late response. George is quite right regarding the line replacement. Now that I have looked into this deeper I can see that the use of the web reference is merely for use at design-time when you want to manipulate custom entities. Assuming nothing changes with the entity, use of DynamicEntity is not necessary when using the web reference. However, entities will frequently change, and to manipulate data from custom entities at runtime, DynamicEntity can be used. DynamicEntity makes the web reference unneccessary since CRM handles it how the user defines it (give it type = 'account' and it'll be treated like an account... give it type = 'custom_object' and CRM will map it to a custom_object).

re: Incorporating Custom Entities into a Plugin (revised)

George Doubinski — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:33:20 GMT

Mitchell,

I'm still at loss why would you need to include your own reference?! You're dealing with DynamicEntity which does support your custom entities regardless of whether you include your wsdl or not. The line

if (vehicle.Name != VehicleNamePlugin.CrmServiceRef.EntityName.new_vehicle.ToString())

can be easily replaced with

if(vehicle.Name != "new_vehicle")

with the same effect minus custom reference.

If you believe that you can easily mix code from your reference and Microsoft.Crm.SdkTypeProxy, well, think again - all the types will clash and you won't be able to cast a thing.

As far as registration is concerned, the only extra bit you're getting is a "type-ahead" - you can still register your custom entity by typing its name manually. I trust you are getting latest plugin registration tool from code.msdn.microsoft.com/crmplugintool and not from SDK.

My 2c