Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Deep Dive: Creating a Basic Plug-in

This is an accompanying blog post to my YouTube video Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Deep Dive: Creating a Basic Plug-in, the second in a series aiming to provide tutorials on how to accomplish developer focused tasks within Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. You can watch the video in full below:

Below you will find links to access some of the resources discussed as part of the video and to further reading topics:

PowerPoint Presentation (click here to download)

Full Code Sample

using System;
using System.Globalization;

using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;

namespace D365.SamplePlugin
{
    public class PreContactCreate_FormatNameValues : IPlugin
    {
        public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
        {
            //Obtain the execution context from the service provider.

            IPluginExecutionContext context = (IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));

            //Extract the tracing service for use in debugging sandboxed plug-ins

            ITracingService tracingService = (ITracingService)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(ITracingService));

            tracingService.Trace("Tracing implemented successfully!");

            if (context.InputParameters.Contains("Target") && context.InputParameters["Target"] is Entity)

            {
                Entity contact = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];

                string firstName = contact.GetAttributeValue<string>("firstname");
                string lastName = contact.GetAttributeValue<string>("lastname");

                TextInfo culture = new CultureInfo("en-GB", false).TextInfo;

                if (firstName != null)
                {

                    tracingService.Trace("First Name Before Value = " + firstName);
                    contact["firstname"] = culture.ToTitleCase(firstName.ToLower());
                    tracingService.Trace("First Name After Value = " + contact.GetAttributeValue<string>("firstname"));

                }

                else

                {
                    tracingService.Trace("No value was provided for First Name field, skipping...");
                }

                if (lastName != null)

                {
                    tracingService.Trace("Last Name Before Value = " + lastName);
                    contact["lastname"] = culture.ToTitleCase(lastName.ToLower());
                    tracingService.Trace("Last Name After Value = " + contact.GetAttributeValue<string>("lastname"));
                }

                else

                {
                    tracingService.Trace("No value was provided for Last Name field, skipping...");
                }

                tracingService.Trace("PreContactCreate_FormatNameValues plugin execution complete.");

            }
        }
    }
}

Download/Resource Links

Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition

Setup a free 30 day trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

C# Guide (Microsoft Docs)

Source Code Management Solutions

• Visual Studio Team Services – Free for up to 5 users and my recommended choice when working with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement
• BitBucket
• GitHub

Further Reading

MSDN – Plug-in development

MSDN – Supported messages and entities for plug-ins

MSDN – Sample: Create a basic plug-in

MSDN – Debug a plug-in

I’ve written a number of blog posts around plug-ins previously, so here’s the obligatory plug section :

• Why CRM Developers Should Use Business Rules More – The post talks more about Business Rules in the context of JScript, but echoes some of the points made in the video in respect to considering plug-ins as a “last resort” solution.
• What is Unsecure/Secure Configuration on a Dynamics CRM/365 for Enterprise Plugin? – Unsecure/Secure Configurations are, arguably, one of those features that people tend to forget about with plug-ins; this post walks through how to implement them within your code.
• Utilising Pre/Post Entity Images in a Dynamics CRM Plugin – One of the best features at your disposal with plug-ins, Entity Images allow you to take snapshots of record data before and after your plug-in executes, and then access this data during runtime.
• What’s the best way of learning CRM Development? – In this post, I talk about some of the things that you can do to help speed your journey towards Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement developer extraordinaire

Interested in learning more about JScript Form function development in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement? Then check out my previous post for my video and notes on the subject. I hope you find these videos useful and do let me know if you have any comments or suggestions for future video content.