Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

In this article I am going to brief about new changes and updates in CRM 2015 online update 1.

Trigger Custom Action from Workflow or Dialog

• We can invoke a custom action directly from within a workflow or a dialog.

Trigger Custom Action from Workflow

Steps on how to Create and Invoke Custom Action from Workflow

Validate Required Steps in Business Process Flow

• System will now validate all the required steps in Business Process before moving to next stage.
• Before Update 1 its possible to bypass validation using SDK calls.

Validate Required Steps BPF

Clear field values with business rules

• Business rules now let us clear field values, on the client and server

Clear Field Values Business Rules

Business Process Flow – Move back to previous Stage

• We can go back to the previous stage in the business process flow regardless of entity type
• You can choose desired previous stage and click ‘Set Active’.

Cant move to Previous stage before Update 1

With Update choose Previous Stage and Set Active

Date and Time field new behavior

• We got two new time zone independent behaviors for the Date and Time data type (Date Only and Time Zone Independent).
• Below are different Formats and Examples.

Date Field Formats

Date Field Changes Examples

Calculated and Rollup Fields

• With new updates to Calculated fields we can compute the difference between the two dates by using new built-in functions
• Note that “Now” operator gives SQL Server Time in UTC not Local System Time.

Calculated and Rollup Fields

Global Most Recently Used (MRU)

• With Global MRU, provided an access to most recently viewed records (up to 30 records).

Global MRU

Global MRU Storage

“Older Than X” Enhancements in Advanced Find

• We can now filter on additional units of time including minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years.
• The Older Than X clauses can be used with Advanced Find, the saved view editor, and queries that are based on FetchXML.

Advanced Find Older Than Operator

Navigation and Themes

• Refer my previous Article

Plug-in Trace Logs

• System administrators and developers can now configure CRM to write trace logs to a new CRM entity – ‘Plug-in Trace Log’.
• These logs can then be viewed within the CRM web application, also from Advanced Find.
• We cannot extend the “Plug-in Trace Log entity”. We can only view or delete records of the entity.
• By default, permission to view the logs is enabled for System Administrators and System Customizers, but can be granted to other users
• Enabling Activity Tracing
  • We can enable\disable from Settings -> Administration -> System Settings -> Customization

  • 

    Enable Plug-in trace log

  • The setting provides the following options:
    • Off
    • Exceptions – log messages only if an exception is encountered in the execution pipeline
    • All – log all messages, even if there was no exception.

How is “Plug-in Trace Logs” different from developers logging in to their own custom entity?

• The problem with writing logs to our own Custom entity is due to the fact plug-ins execute in transaction and the transaction is rolled back whenever an exception occurs anywhere in the event pipeline. As a result, the records written to the custom entity would also be rolled back.
• And with new ‘Plug-in Trace Logs’ entity, the messages are logged even if an exception is encountered and the rest of the transaction is rolled back

References

• MSDN Article
• Application New Features – Video

🙂