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How to capture and store a field each time it changes

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Posted on by USA80

If an Account name changes, I need to send an email to some people. In the email I need to let them know what the original name was and then what the new name is. How can I capture this?

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Ramit Paul 22,797 Most Valuable Professional on at

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If your question was related to MSD365 FO, then you can use changed base alert feature.

docs.microsoft.com/.../alerts-overview

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Wahaj Rashid 11,321 on at

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Hi,

Thank you for your query.

Ideally, you should:

Enable Auditing.

Create a workflow to send an email with the Account link (Dynamics Record URL), whenever the account name changes.

User clicks on the Record, the account will open, and then they can see Audit History for the new and old value

If it is necessary to send old and new name in the Email, you can use either a real-time workflow (with a temp field or use a plugin with pre and post-image).

As a No-Code solution, use a real-time workflow with a temp field, see the following article:

Real-Time Workflow: Capturing Pre and Post Values | PowerObjects

For plugins, you need to write a plugin that:

Triggers on Account Update (Pre-stage).

Register Pre and Post Images with the account name field.

Now you will get the pre and post values of the account name in the plugin, send an email using SendEmailRequest.

Here is a sample:

Dynamics 365 Plugins - Pre and Post Images - Carl de Souza

To send an email using C#/plugin:

Send a Dynamics 365 Email using C# - Carl de Souza

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AriaConsulting 2 on at

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USA80,

There are even additional options to the ones that Wahaj Rashid kindly provided. However, this method gives you the option to report on/action changes from any 365 service that is enabled for auditing (including SharePoint and Exchange even). In any case you have to have auditing turned on and configured. Once auditing is on you can use the Office 365 Management Activity API to query the M365 (not D365) Compliance Center, which is where the log data actually ends up. It goues there as otherwise you would chew through your D365 storage quota very quickly indeed! Once you connect to the API and format the query(ies) you want, you can use a webhook for notifications. Which can obviously be in the format of email. The bonus with this is that if you have PBI licenses you can get double the benefit from the same work by also hooking it up to PowerBI. And if you want to get even more fancy you could create a running history in a custom table and then add said custom table to the D365 form as a subgrid.

If you want to take on an entire project of effort you could go all the way to connecting the audit logs to Azure Sentinel (Microsoft's SIEM tool) and then you can get such a deluge of information d insight it would likely make your head hurt. But that's probably 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more than you're wanting .

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meelamri 13,216 User Group Leader on at

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Hi,

There is also an approach that requires no code:

Create a technical field (OldName)

A Workflow that runs before the modification of the Name field, which will store the current value of the name in the technical field (OldName)

A second Workflow that will run after the modification and that will retrieve the old value from the created technical field. So you can send your mail with both values.

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AriaConsulting 2 on at

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Uhhh meelamri, that's exactly what Wahaj Rashid suggested......

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meelamri 13,216 User Group Leader on at

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Right, good point :)

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AriaConsulting 2 on at

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LOL!

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