Dynamics 365 Upgrade – Entity doesn’t contain attribute with Name = ‘fullname’.

Today I upgraded a Dynamics CRM 2016 Online Update 1 instance to Dynamics 365. Everything seemed to be going well. However when using Global Search I was getting the error below.

Query Builder Error – The specified field does not exist in Dynamics 365. If you contact support, please provide the technical details.

Checking the exception, I could see the error was related to an attribute called fullname. The exception was :

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]: 'new_testentity' entity doesn't contain attribute with Name = 'a_9967534d3095e111b8e718a9056eb611.fullname'.Detail:

<OrganizationServiceFault xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts">

  <ActivityId>91195997-e676-46e2-ac04-f744482d1431</ActivityId>

  <ErrorCode>-2147217149</ErrorCode>

  <ErrorDetails xmlns:d2p1="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />

  <Message>'new_testentity' entity doesn't contain attribute with Name = 'a_9967534d3095e111b8e718a9056eb611.fullname'.</Message>

  <Timestamp>2017-02-13T14:14:04.3720628Z</Timestamp>

  <ExceptionSource i:nil="true" />

  <InnerFault i:nil="true" />

  <OriginalException i:nil="true" />

  <TraceText i:nil="true" />

</OrganizationServiceFault>

After some testing, I discovered it was only happening when a single entity type was involved, or showed up in some search results. To verify, I went into Settings -> Administration – > System Settings -> General -> Select Entities for Categorized Search and, sure enough, when I remove my custom entity from the entity search list, searching started working again.

So where did the fullname attribute come from? – it didn’t exist on the entity I removed. I then checked the associated and quick find views for the custom entity I was working with. They both had a column added to display the related contact name – which is where the a_9967534d3095e111b8e718a9056eb611.fullname field name came from.

When I removed that column from the views, republished my solution and did a CTRL F5 to refresh my browser, global search (both categorized and the new relevance search!) started to work again.

I logged this with Microsoft support who informed me that this is a known issue and the ultimate fix will hopefully make it into the next release (March 2017). Looks like it was introduced between CRM Online 2016 Service Update 4 (8.1.0.0538) and Dynamics 365 (8.2.0.737)

Until the next release fixes this issue, use this as a viable workaround.