Posted on April 10th, 2012
In the “oh my, how did that slip through?” category comes this one: in Dynamics CRM 2011, the ZIP/Postal Code field on the Address (CustomerAddress) entity is not searchable by default.
Weirder is that the ZIP/Postal Code fields on the Account, Lead, and Contact entities are searchable by default. Weird only because they use the same underlying table (CustomerAddress).
Keep this in mind when you wonder why you can’t search for additional addresses by ZIP code. Make that ZIP/Postal Code field on the Address entity searchable, and you’re good to go.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Posted on April 6th, 2012
For the past few weeks, an FTP upload has been failing, rather religiously, with the following .Net error:
System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive.
For the FTP upload, I was using the .Net FtpWebRequest class, in a rather simple code snippet:
FtpWebRequest request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(config.Uri);
request.UsePassive = config.UsePassive;
request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.UploadFile;
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(config.UserName, config.Password);
The FTP connection was dropping, but why? The transfer file was rather large (over 50MB), but reading the MSDN documentation for the FtpWebRequest.Timeout property, it was pretty clear that the .Net Framework wasn’t timing out, because:
FtpWebRequest.Timeout Property
Type: System.Int32
An Int32 value that contains the number of milliseconds to wait before a request times out. The default value is Infinite.
I tried active and passive connections; both failed. I checked the firewall; nothing unusual. I tried other external servers; they all failed. What gives?
Finally, exasperated, I tried forcing the timeout:
FtpWebRequest request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(config.Uri);
request.UsePassive = config.UsePassive;
request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.UploadFile;
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(config.UserName, config.Password);
request.Timeout = -1;
Viola! The FTP upload did not fail! Stepping through the code, I found that, contrary to the documentation, the default value for FtpWebReqeust.Timeout is not infinite:
 That is right, my friends: contrary to what you read in the documentation, the default value is 100,000 milliseconds, or about 1 minute, 40 seconds.
Lessons learned:
- Don’t believe everything you read.
- Trust, but verify.
- Infinite is not infinite when it is not infinite.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Posted on January 15th, 2012
Anyone who has attempted to configure Dynamics CRM 2011 with an Internet-Facing Deployment (IFD) knows that it is no trivial task. Where there are blog posts that discuss setting up an IFD, and Microsoft documentation for configuring the IFD, they often assume that ADFS and Dynamics CRM are installed on the same server, and that there is only one Dynamics CRM front-end server. Unfortunately, real-world implementations don’t always follow that.
For example, take the following configuration:
- a Dynamics CRM front-end server on the internal network, providing services to internal clients
- a Dynamics CRM front-end server in an Internet-facing zone, providing services to external clients
- a separate ADFS server accessible to internal and external clients
Dynamics CRM with IFD requires a combination of ADFS relaying party trusts and DNS configuration to get things working. One caveat with IFDs is that the internal and external host names for the Dynamics CRM front-end servers must be different because, externally, the host name includes the CRM organization name. Where, internally, you may have https://icrm.contoso.com/crm, externally you would have https://crm.contoso.com.
Let’s flesh out our sample implementation and requirements:
- icrm.contoso.com is our internal Dynamics CRM front-end server, accessible only on the internal network
- ecrm.contoso.com is our external Dynamics CRM front-end server, accessible to our internal network and the public Internet
- adfs.contoso.com is our ADFS server, accessible to our internal network and the public Internet
- We have two Dynamics CRM organizations: CRM and CRM-Test.
- We want our internal and external (public Internet) clients to access CRM using the same URLs: crm.contoso.com and crm-test.contoso.com. In other words, we don’t want the two-URL problem outlined above.
The last bit has nothing to do with Dynamics CRM: it is all done in IIS. Let me explain how. . . . → Read More: URL Rewriting for user-friendly URLs with Dynamics CRM 2011
Posted on January 13th, 2012
Working with Dynamics CRM 2011, I started getting an error when attempting to delete a managed solution:
Error deleting a managed solution: State code or status code is invalid
State code is invalid or state code is valid but status code is invalid for a specified state code.
The ErrorDetails.txt file states the following — note the text in bold.
Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=5.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]: 1 is not a valid status code for state code SavedQueryState.Inactive on savedquery.Detail:
Error Code -2147187704
CallStack
at Microsoft.Crm.Extensibility.VersionedPluginProxyStepBase.Execute(PipelineExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.Extensibility.Pipeline.Execute(PipelineExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.Extensibility.MessageProcessor.Execute(PipelineExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.Extensibility.InternalMessageDispatcher.Execute(PipelineExecutionContext context)
at Microsoft.Crm.Extensibility.ExternalMessageDispatcher.ExecuteInternal(IInProcessOrganizationServiceFactory serviceFactory, IPlatformMessageDispatcherFactory dispatcherFactory, String messageName, String requestName, Int32 primaryObjectTypeCode, Int32 secondaryObjectTypeCode, ParameterCollection fields, CorrelationToken correlationToken, CallerOriginToken originToken, UserAuth userAuth, Guid callerId, Guid transactionContextId, Int32 invocationSource, Nullable`1 requestId, Version endpointVersion)
at Microsoft.Crm.Extensibility.OrganizationSdkServiceInternal.ExecuteRequest(OrganizationRequest request, CorrelationToken correlationToken, CallerOriginToken callerOriginToken, WebServiceType serviceType)
at Microsoft.Crm.Extensibility.OrganizationSdkServiceInternal.Execute(OrganizationRequest request, CorrelationToken correlationToken, CallerOriginToken callerOriginToken, WebServiceType serviceType)
This error came about after we marked some of the out-of-the-box views as Inactive (like “Accounts: Responded to Campaigns in Last 6 Months”). Looking at the database, the . . .
→ Read More: Fixing ‘State code or status code is invalid’ errors when deleting solutions in Dynamics CRM 2011
Posted on November 4th, 2011
In a recent deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, users were accessing the application via the server’s host name, e.g. https://crmserver01.company.com. That is rather unfriendly, so we created a new DNS record for crm.company.com — giving users the easier-to-remember https://crm.company.com (and removing a dependency on a server name).
Unfortunately, authenticating to https://crm.company.com didn’t work for Internet Explorer users. IE would prompt for the credentials, but they were never accepted. Authentication did work for other browsers, and all browsers — including IE — were able to authenticate to https://crmserver01.company.com without issue.
This didn’t make sense. The domain name of the server shouldn’t matter (both were in IE’s Local Intranet Zone), nor should the browser version. But the different experience between browsers was all I had to go on, so I did some (network) sniffing.
Using Fiddler2 to monitor the network traffic created by web browsers, I opened Firefox and connected to http://crm.company.com (no SSL, so it’s easier to monitor network traffic). Firefox . . .
→ Read More: Troubleshooting Windows Authentication in IIS
|
|
