Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Link Buddy for Dynamics CRM

On one of my Dynamics CRM (on-premises) projects, the company wanted CRM to calculate pricing for insurance-related services. We implemented the functionality in a plug-in and added tons of logging (log4net) statements to help us analyze CRM data during testing and troubleshooting. The pricing path went through dozens of steps, so being able to see the logic path taken was essential.

The log files contain mostly CRM record GUIDs -- the thought was that we could use those GUIDs to manually navigate to CRM records when needed. That turned out to be a pain.

So I worked late one night a created a Windows app that translates one or more CRM entity record GUIDs into CRM "addressable" form hyperlinks. Now, we (including end-users) can copy the log contents to the app, click a button and get hyperlinks that lead to the actual CRM records.

I named the app "Link Buddy for Dynamics CRM". It's up on CodePlex (source code and executable) if you'd like to put it to use. Please let me know if you run into any issues with it, have suggestions, etc.

-Tim