Plugin for opportunity Win / Lose

It can be a common requirement to execute plug-ins when opportunities are closed as Win or Lose. In most cases you need to identify two cases separately. Ironically, I didn’t find many resourceful articles about it. In fact, I thought of sharing my experience.

These are the relevant statecode and statuscode combination for opportunity.

First one could think of having a State Change plug-in for this. But I learned it’s not successful.

Whether it is Win or Lose, opportunity will be closed. So it creates a record in OpportunityClose entity. Then I though, we could do a create plug-in for OpportunityClose entity. Now the problem is you are not able to catch whether it’s a Win or Lose. If your requirement is just to do something when opportunity is closed, this works.

Then only I decided to do two different plugin for Win message and Lose message which triggers the plugin in the correct action.

So correct plugin registration steps would be seen as below;

Then I checked the plug-in context which made me shocked again. It doesn’t have opportunity record but it does have an OpportunityClose.

OpportunityClose is of course an unfamiliar entity for me. For you too obviously! Then only I realised it should be called a “Black Sheep”. You know why? Could you guess the primary Key of this entity? Your obvious answer should be opportunitycloseid which is completely wrong! Check below picture. It is Activityid!

Anyway, strangeness of primary key was explained only for your knowledge. The good side is this entity contains opportunityid which is the gateway for all the attributes of our current record. So for both Win and Lose plugins I started coding as below, by passing the OpportunityClose instead of Opportunity, knowing that it contains opportunityid.

context = (IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));
factory = (IOrganizationServiceFactory)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IOrganizationServiceFactory));
service = factory.CreateOrganizationService(context.UserId);

if (context.InputParameters.Contains("OpportunityClose"))
{
   oppCloseEnt = (Entity)context.InputParameters["OpportunityClose"];
   .........
   .........
}

In summery I am passing opportunityclose, read opportunityid in it, retrieve opportunity fields I need using the service. In a way, it’s like asking something about your home from your neighbour! Anyway, it worked for me!

Issues of using checkbox in CRM 2011

In a previous post I explained difference of using onChange and onClick in CRM 4.0

Now it has come the time to talk the same thing against CRM 2011. As same as 4.0, even in CRM 2011 we got only the onChange in native manner. As we all know the problem is you need to click somewhere else after clicking the checkbox to execute the event.  So we need to implement onClick to accomplish this. It is bit similar to  4.0, but there is a complication.

For some crazy reason, standard Xrm model that works for 2011 doesn’t work here and have to use the 4.0 style code. Other issue is execution take cyclic pattern and our code gets executed twice! So we need to change the focus as soon as we finish the code. Please check the working code (this should go in onload event);

MyCheckbox = function()
{
    crmForm.all.new_sample.onclick = function()
    {
       //Code
       //Change focus to another field  
    }
}

Issues are not finish yet! Practically, we might need to do something according to the value of the relevant check box. Biggest confusion comes here. Values given are completely opposite. When you check the checkbox you might get false instead of true and vice versa. Why this happens?

I am trying to understand it this way. (please correct me If I am wrong) This is not an error. We are executing the code on “click”. This doesn’t mean we have changed the value in the time we execute the code. Of course what we see is the "changed" situation through the form. Actually code happens for previous value of the check box. I think this is the reason Microsoft doesn’t provide this event in their native framework.

If we understand this, we are good to proceed with our work without any trouble. Only thing is do the opposite when playing around with the value of the checkbox upon onClick.

var _checkbox = Xrm.Page.getAttribute("new_sample").getValue();
if (_checkbox == true)
{ 
  //code for false 
}
else
{
  //code for true 
}

This is bit confusing.. but manageable.