POLLING IN DYNAMICS CRM USING setTimeout() in JS

As a CRM developer, we have encountered situations where we needs to wait for a fixed interval of time or wait for an event to occur in order to execute our JS code. In computer terms, this term is often referred as “Polling”. The actual definition of polling in CRM terms can be interpreted as “Actively sampling the status of a field or CRM record inside our java script as a synchronous activity before executing the main algorithm in JS”.

You may wonder what is the necessity of performing polling activity inside Dynamics CRM? Well the main purpose of this blog is to unveil that mystery and deep dive into some real time examples of its usage.

Business Requirement #1: When we open a new email/trying to create a new one, the from field in the new email always gets defaulted to one of the service account in CRM. The requirement is to default the from email field to logged-in users name. Initially, we wrote a java script On Load event and check if the form type equals 1, then populate the from field with current user. But our value is being over written by the CRM default service account. Therefore we need to insert polling into our JS when we need to wait and check until the CRM populates the default value and then overwrite it with logged-in user.

Since the time taken to populate a default value by CRM is always fixed, we don’t see any necessity in using polling (which is apt if the time interval is variable). Therefore, we just did some trial & error method and used JS native setTimeout() with a time out value of 1000ms. The code is :

setTimeout( function() { 
//Write your logic
},1000);

function moveNextStage(currentStage){
    
            var pollingNumber = 10;
            var intervalId;

            intervalId = setInterval(function () {
                pollingNumber -= 1;
                if (Xrm.Page.data.process.getActiveStage().getName() != currentStage) {
                    clearInterval(intervalId);
                }
                if (!Xrm.Page.data.entity.getIsDirty() && Xrm.Page.data.process.getActiveStage().getName() == currentStage) {
                    Xrm.Page.data.process.moveNext(function (result) {
                        if (result != null) {
                            // Success handle
                        }
                    });
                    pollingNumber = 0;
                    clearInterval(intervalId);
                }
                if (pollingNumber <= 0) {
                    clearInterval(intervalId);
                }
            }, 300);
}

function _polling (callback)
{
setTimeout (function ()
{ 	
If ( !Xrm.Page.data.entity.getIsDirty()) return callback();
_polling (callback);
},500);
}
function _moveNextStage()
{
_polling ( function () 
{
Console.log(“ Form save is completed”);
//write your code to move BPF stage
});
}