Run workflow on thousends of records

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Member

Hi Gents,

I would like to run a specific worflow on thousends of records on a weekly basis.

because every week the filter for the records I want to turn it on might be change, I want to do it internally on the crm and not by external plugin (easier to manage)

I thought to use a rollup query of some kind of advanced find query in order to tell crm on which records I want to triggr my workflow on.

I don't want to select thousends of records each week and manully run work flow, It will take me a while as I have 20k records + each week it will be done for the same records + a few will add up.

Any ideas how can I run workflows on multiple records automatically without actually selecting the records throught the views and run it automatically?

Can I use advanced find to tell crm on which records I want to run a specific workflow?

Thanks for your precious help...

*This post is locked for comments

I have the same question (0)

All responses (8)

Answers (0)

Gus Gonzalez 27,113 on at

Like (0)

Report

I got an idea. :)

1. Add a two-options field called "Run Workflow" to the records you want to run the workflow for.

2. Create a workflow that fires upon the "Run Workflow" field change, checks if the field equals Yes and then does whatever it is you want it to do. At the end, add a line to set the field back to no.

3. Create a view with all the records you want to run the workflow for, one of the columns on the view will have the "Run Workflow" field, export all records to excel making sure you can edit and import back in.

All records will be exported with "No" on the field column above, change to 'Yes' and import all records, the workflow will automatically fire up, updating all records automatically.

Here is a video showing how to do the data export/edit/import part:

I hope that suffices.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Member on at

Like (0)

Report

well, this a possible solution but I'm looking more after automated kind of process. CRM has strong features of advanced find that being in use all over. I would really like to be able to utilize it and save this manual work of import export once a week.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Member on at

Like (0)

Report

but thanks for your suggestion! it is probably an option :)

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Gus Gonzalez 27,113 on at

Like (0)

Report

That is the only option I can think of out of the box.

It looks like a lot of steps but once you do it a couple of times, you will be able to make the change in less than 2 minutes. :)

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

cja_intgrtch 1,250 on at

Like (0)

Report

I use mscrmtoolkit.codeplex.com/documentation for this purpose. Works fine.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
qqqqqqq on at

Like (0)

Report

You could use N52 Formula Manager's in-built scheduler to define a schedule,

-That executes every night

-Runs an advanced find to select the required records

-Name a workflow that you want to execute for those records

support.north52.com/.../128405-getting-started-create-your-first-schedule

The product has a free standard edition that you can use even in production environments.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
John Upton on at

Like (0)

Report

As there doesn't seem to be a 3rd party tool to do this for you, your options are to run the workflow on some event and fire the event for all records (i.e. by importing updating a "dummy" boolean field), you can run it manually on 250 records at a time or you can write 5-10 lines of code to fire an on-demand workflow on all records without polluting the DB schema.

Use LINQpad or a .Net console application to Retrieve the IDs of all the records you want to execute against (you can get FetchXML from the Advanced Find form if you wish see: ExecuteFetchRequest) then execute the workflow using the ExecuteWorkflowRequest.

If you have the technical experience, I'd highly recommend the latter solution.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Royal King 27,686 on at

Like (0)

Report

there is no out of box to do this but there is a custom workflow that can be used to solve this problem.

Check the below post explains exactly same scenario and provides solution

alexanderdevelopment.net/.../scheduling-recurring-dynamics-crm-workflows-with-fetchxml

Was this reply helpful? Yes No