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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Pull data from externa...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Pull data from external systems on demand

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Posted on by Community Member

Hi, 

I am fairly new to Dynamics 365 (CRM in general) development so I'm looking for guidance on the best practice (or bad practice to avoid) to implement this certain requirement.  When creating a case and one of its field change, say a Contact field, it needs to pull related data records for that contact from an external system and then displayed in a subgrid in the case form.  (We do not want to store this data in CRM, it has been decided to just get them as needed.) When the case gets saved, each of the related records will be stored in CRM as well.  Thus, Case has one to many relationship with this entity.  I know you could make an API call via javascript (taking into account CORS) or do the API call via custom action with plugin or custom workflow activity, but I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it.  And how do you go about displaying them in the subgrid?  The only way I found so far is to manually parse the result via javascript.  Appreciate any help on this.

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  • Suggested answer
    ashlega Profile Picture
    ashlega 34,477 on at
    RE: Pull data from external systems on demand

    Here is one option: when the field changes, ask the users if they want to save the change.. develop an on "update" plugin that will pull data from the external system and create records in CRM - register it on the update of that attribute.. If the case has one-to-many with that entity, and if you populate case lookup on that entity correctly in the plugin, then once the form comes back (after save), all those records will show up in the subgrid:

    www.crmsoftwareblog.com/.../adding-sub-grid-related-records-dynamics-crm-contacts

  • David Jennaway Profile Picture
    David Jennaway 14,065 on at
    RE: Pull data from external systems on demand

    If you're using CRM v9, then I'd consider using a virtual entity. If not, I'd normally use server-side, rather than client-side code for this, so a plugin or custom workflow activity

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