Hi,
I want to send an email from CRM to my contacts on their birthday. I use the 'birthdate' field to record all contact's DOB.
I want a job that queries all contacts once a day to look for contact's who's birthdate = today, and send them an email. How can I achieve this without using waiting workflows?
Thanks,
Rich
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Fantastic!! Thank you very much Siraj!
Hi Rich, the alternate to using workflows is to use a Azure to offload the workload which would be better as Long running or volume actions aren’t intended to be run from plug-ins or workflows.
Sample code for Azure aware custom WF Activity
msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg327854.aspx
msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg334766.aspx
Best Wishes, Raz
By wanting to not use waiting workflows I'm going to assume you mean you don't want to have a workflow in waiting on each contact.
One way to solve this is to create a new entity, something in the lines of "birthday email job", that can be the carrier for a single waiting workflow.
You then simply make a workflow for this entity that calls a custom workflow activity which will be repsonsible for finding the appropriate contacts and creating email messages for them.
Let your workflow fire up on create of the birthday email job entity, do the searching and sending call and end the workflow with a step that creates a new birthday email job entity for tomorrow. Solve the "only send once a day" limit by having your workflow wait 1 day.
If you truly don't wish to utilize workflows at all, you would probably have to create a service external from CRM and query data through the API instead.
Hi Rich,
you could try this general approach:
this will not create a big performance impact but involves some thinking.
Your custom workflow needs to query and implement the business logic you need.
Cheers,
Andreas
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