CRM development: Entity array to dictionary

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Posted on by Thom

Looking to add our subject entity parentsubjects to a dictionary. I have been able to create the array as follows, with the ‘title’ required appearing in Attributes > Values within each subject selected:

var query = new QueryExpression()

{

EntityName = Subject.EntityLogicalName,

ColumnSet = new ColumnSet("title"),

Criteria = new FilterExpression()

};

query.Criteria.AddCondition("parentsubject", ConditionOperator.Null);

query.ColumnSet.AddColumns("title");

var subjectRecords = myCRMProxy.RetrieveMultiple(query).Entities.ToArray();

Entity[] allSubjects = subjectRecords;

Previously we have added our optionsets to a dictionary using the code below – the OptionMetadata class has the Value / Label methods needed but I’ve been unable to find a similar class that invokes these against the entity;

foreach (OptionMetadata optionMetadata in optionList)

{

dictionary.Add((Int64)optionMetadata.Value, optionMetadata.Label.LocalizedLabels[0].Label);

}

How can we add the entity array Values to our dictionary? Any help immensely appreciated.

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Bas van de Sande 4,383 on at

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Technically:

You could use the Dictionary<TKEY,TVAL> of the System.Collections.Generic namespace to facilitate your own in memory dictionary. Where TKEY is the type of the key (which is unique) and TVAL is the entity stored in the dictionary.

What do you want to achieve? Just storing entities in a dictionary means that you have to parse each property in the entity each time you need to access the entity in the dictionary.

Why don't you map the entity first to a custom class, from where you can use strong typed attributes on the class?

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Royal King 27,686 on at

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try with below code

var subjectRecords = myCRMProxy.RetrieveMultiple(query).Entities.ToArray();

foreach (var subject in subjectRecords )

{

dictionary.Add(subject .Id,subject.GetAttributeValue<string>("title"));

}

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Thom on at

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Hi Bas

Thanks for the speedy response! Each dictionary is being called by a web service, which then updates a web form with options for a dropdownlists. My thinking was that mapping to a custom class would mean the development would not dynamically update when the system was.

I'm new to this sort of development but had seem the <TKEY,TVAL> option mentioned on other forums, but was unable to decipher how I could apply it to our scenario.

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Thom on at

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Hi Chitra

Thank you for this. Have tried it out but got the following errors:

- Argument1: cannot convert from 'System.Guid' to 'long'

- The best overloaded method match for 'Systems.Collections.Dictionary<long,string)' has some invalid arguments

Would this be down to the dictionary type we're using?

Dictionary<Int64, string> dictionary = new Dictionary<Int64, string>();

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Royal King 27,686 on at

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data type of id is guid not int so change the data type in dictionary

Dictionary<Guid, string> dictionary = new Dictionary<Guid, string>();

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Thom on at

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Chitra, you are now my most favourite human being! Thanks so much for your input, prompt and direct. Much appreciated!!!

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Bas van de Sande 4,383 on at

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in case you want to learn more on generic programming, you can check out this simple example on www.dotnetperls.com/generic

Generics can be very helpful :)

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Thom on at

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Hi Bas, that's great - really useful resource, thanks very much!

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