How to get the parent windows Xrm context in JavaScript

In the latest version (CRM 2016) the Xrm context seems to be buried in a frame. So to get it you need to do this:

window.top.opener.frames[0].Xrm.Page.data.entity.getEntityName()

Locating the parent context seems to change with different releases of CRM so I'd guess it's technically not supported. At least it has the potential of not surviving an upgrade so something to be aware of!

CRM Online - rsProcessingError

Some day in the future I indeed to cover a more detailed post for CRM Online and diagnosing why you might get rsProcessingAborted or rsProcessingError messages on SSRS reports. It's a bit more involved than on premise due to the logging access limitations of CRM Online. In an on premise environment you can simply log on to your SSRS server and grab the log to get more detail. You don't get access to the same level of logging with CRM Online.

For now I will describe a very rudimentary/old school way to analyse a report I had deployed to CRM Online throwing the following error



Not much to go on, you get a retry and a close, unfortunately no download log. Searching around CRM gave no hints as to what was causing this.

What was my particular issue?

Firstly, you might be wondering what was the exact problem I ran into on my report. It was an issue with images which we have attached to an entity. We use this to download and display images on the report. The SSRS report was set up to render a JPEG, but somebody uploaded a BMP file. This was oddly working fine from within Visual Studio, but in the Report Viewer it did not like it. I would have liked the image to not render instead of throwing an error like the above. But how did I discover the problem?

Step 1 - It works on my machine!

I started with the old developer trick to see if it ran on my machine. Open up Visual Studio and run the report for the same report/record combination. You can do this by modifying the parameter called CRM_Filterednew_entity where obviously "new_entity" refers to the entity you run the report against. This parameter is simply some fetch xml that you can build using an advanced find to filter to the record in question.

Once you have performed the above, does the report run? If not you should get an error a bit more substantial than what the Report View was displaying.

If the report does indeed run, check instead for warnings. These can often surface as a processing error in Report Viewer. Nuke all of your warnings where possible!

None of the above worked for me.

Step 2 - Trim the hedges

It's working within visual studio. So what can you do? Create a copy of the report and start trimming pieces off it to find the root cause. Start with more likely parts, for example:

Remove a complex table. Deploy the report. Does it run?
Remove some complex expressions. Deploy the report. Does it run?
Remove sorts. Deploy the report. Does it run?
Remove show/hide expressions etc. Does it run?
Remove images. Does it run?
...

This is where I stopped as it highlighted my issue, but you see where I'm going with this. Keep stripping bits and pieces until you hit what's making the report fail. You can undertake this process of elimination in quite a binary fashion as well to speed up the process. For example, remove half of the report, does the error go away? Remove the other half, does the error go away? Drill into the half with the error and repeat the process.

Dynamics CRM - Attribute Mapping Issue

Dynamics CRM, like most software products, will have bugs. Most aren't world ending to be fair, but often those slightly less visible ones linger for quite some time. Take this issue I came across today.

We have a custom entity in our system which has 3 lookups to the account entity. Each lookup serves a different purpose:

• Company
• PR Company
• Joint Broker

All of the above are a different type of account in our system, but are accounts all the same. You can see the problem that exists straight off if you take a look under the hood. Open up one of the relationships and check the mappings section. It contains all 3 of the above as part of the attribute mapping.

The issue with this is if you open an account and create a new one of these custom records (from any relationship) it will populate ALL three of the lookups with the same account. You cannot delete these mappings, or disable them. Unfortunately you are stuck with them. This bug has existed for at least 2 years going by an issue raised in CRM community forum back in 2014.

So what is the workaround?

If you need this populated based on the relationship that the record was created through, you might be in a bit of a pickle. I currently know of no supported way to do this without writing your own add buttons to the ribbons, but that is quite a lot of effort for very little reward.

On the other hand, if you only ever want 1 (or particular) lookups populated there is a way to fix it.Write a JavaScript function a bit like the following:

function FixAttributeMappings() {
    // If we are in a create form blank the attribute mappings
    if (Xrm.Page.ui.getFormType() == 1) {
        Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_jointbroker").setValue(null);
        Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_prcompany").setValue(null);
    }
}

Call that function in the OnLoad of your entity and they are blanked whenever you create a new record of that type.