5 things you should know about Whats new in Facebook 2019

I will be the most dumb guy, if I had to start this post by introducing facebook to the readers. :)

In this post, we are going to see 5 most important updates to Facebook in 2019.

This post is aimed at just giving you a glimpse of what has changed and not in details.

1. Playable Game Ads:

We all like to test drive things before we actually buy it. Similar to Car Test Drives, Trails before buying a dress., etc, Facebook has introduced playable ads for games which allows you to play a minimal version of the game so that users can kind of get a taste on the actual game.

2. Libra: FB's Crypto Currency

Crypto Currencies getting into the spot light these days, Facebook has unveiled its own Crypto Currency named "Libra". Apart from using this crypto currency for typical things like online shopping, developer payments etc, FB also has plans to implement this crypto currency for day today activities like, transactions between individuals.

3. Policy Extension to Canada on Political Ads.

Facebook has recently announced that it is extending the Transparent Ads policy to Canada which means that any ads related to Political or Social issues will be displayed with the information about who paid for these ads.

So, If you want to run ads on Politics, elections etc, you first have to identify yourself first and then you have the option to select whether you want to display your name or a page that is managed by yourself.

For more information this, click here

4.Messenger

Facebook has recently taken many steps to bring Messenger into spot light and also to provide a seamless experience while using its other apps like Instagram & Whatsapp.

In view of that, Messenger will be available as an app across Mac & Windows, so that you don't necessarily have to keep the fb tab always open even if you just want to only message your friends.

Facebook is also planning to take Messenger upfront to the Business Usage as well for things like, generating leads via Messenger and also introducing a 24 hour windows within which Business can  reply to the consumers with a promotional message who might be contacting them with queries.

Facebook also has claimed that, soon it will be making the app to a much smaller and faster.

For more information on this policy, click here

5. Algorithm

Facebook state that it has modified its Algorithm to decide what appears on News Feed. This change has been done to keep the focus on posts from Friends,Family and the pages you like. This could give a hard time to the Marketers since they have to work hard to pop into users News Feed. This also means that the more you engage with users, the more your promotional posts might appear in user's feed.

Case Sensitivity on Ribbon Workbench Customisations

If you have noticed the ribbons on the CRM classic UI, you might have seen that labels of the buttons are displayed as Capitals no matter how you configure them on the ribbon workbench.

But with the introduction of the UCI, it displays the labels as how it is configured, i.e if you have entered the label in lowercase, UCI also displays as Lower case and if you have configured the label as Full Caps, UCI also displays as Full Caps.

Recently, I was working on custom buttons and one of the button's name was on Full Caps which stood out a little while the label on other buttons are Initial Caps. So, I decided to edit the label with the Initial Caps via Ribbon Workbench, but even after multiple publish, it just didn't seem to react to my changes. The label was still displayed as Full Caps.

To fix this scenario, I had to do two sequential changes.
The label of the button is "Create Account".
Initially, the label was "CREATE ACCOUNT"  and then changed the label to "Create Account" via Ribbon Workbench but like I mentioned before, it didn't work.
What worked was,
1. Change the label to something that is completely different from the original label. For eg, Contact.
2. Publish the solution
3. Now, edit the label again with "Create Account" (Notice the letters are Initial Caps).
4. Publish the solution now and it should work.

This is basically a scenario where the label of the button is same but you are just trying to change the case of the label.

Dynamics 365 CE: Quick Reference on Client Side Events

Below are the list of components and related events that might occur on the client side which can further be used as triggers for the custom logic implementation using javascript.

Component	Related Events
Attribute	OnChange
Form	OnLoad, OnSave
Form Data	OnLoad
Grid & SubGrid	OnChange, OnLoad ,OnRecordSelect, OnSave
Iframe	OnReadyStateComplete
Knowledge Base Search	OnResultOpened, OnSelection, PostSearch
Lookup Control	PreSearch
Process	OnProcessStatusChange, OnStateChange, OnStageSelected
Tab	TabStateChange

How To Retrieve More than 5000 records in D365 Console App

As you might already know that, by default, only 5000 records are retrieved irrespective of whether you are using an Advanced Find or server side code, hence it is very important especially in case if you are developing an enterprise application, you should ensure that the result set that you are acting on should hold the complete results and not the default 5000.

Below class can be used to achieve the same.
The key thing to notice here is, we are basically using the pagingCookie, MoreRecords & pageNumber properties to achieve this.

HelperClass:

class RetrieveAllRecords
    {
        #region Retrieve more than 5000 records
        /// <summary>
        /// Retrieve more than 5000 records based on pagig cookie information
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="service">Organization service</param>
        /// <param name="fetchXml">Fetchml describing the filter criteria</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static List<Entity> RetreiveAll(IOrganizationService service, string fetchXml)
        {
            // Set the number of records per page to retrieve.
            int fetchCount = 5000;
            // Initialize the page number.
            int pageNumber = 1;

            // Specify the current paging cookie. For retrieving the first page,
            // pagingCookie should be null.
            string pagingCookie = null;
            List<Entity> entityCollection = new List<Entity>();

            while (true)
            {
                // Build fetchXml string with the placeholders.
                string xml = CreateXml(fetchXml, pagingCookie, pageNumber, fetchCount);

                // Excute the fetch query and get the xml result.
                RetrieveMultipleRequest fetchRequest = new RetrieveMultipleRequest
                {
                    Query = new FetchExpression(xml)
                };
                EntityCollection returnCollection = ((RetrieveMultipleResponse)service.Execute(fetchRequest)).EntityCollection;
                foreach (var entity in returnCollection.Entities)
                {
                    entityCollection.Add(entity);
                }

                // Check for morerecords, if it returns 1.
                if (returnCollection.MoreRecords)
                {
                    pageNumber++;
                    pagingCookie = returnCollection.PagingCookie;
                }
                else
                {
                    return entityCollection;
                }
            }
        }
        #endregion

        #region CreateXml
        /// <summary>
        /// Creates and fomrats xml based on the paging cookie
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="xml"></param>
        /// <param name="cookie"></param>
        /// <param name="page"></param>
        /// <param name="count"></param>
        /// <returns>FetchXML</returns>
        public static string CreateXml(string xml, string cookie, int page, int count)
        {
            StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(xml);
            XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(stringReader);

            // Load document
            XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
            doc.Load(reader);

            return CreateXml(doc, cookie, page, count);
        }
        #endregion

        #region CreateXml Document
        /// <summary>
        /// Creates a XML Document that can be sent back to CRM along with Paging Information
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="doc"></param>
        /// <param name="cookie"></param>
        /// <param name="page"></param>
        /// <param name="count"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string CreateXml(XmlDocument doc, string cookie, int page, int count)
        {
            XmlAttributeCollection attributes = doc.DocumentElement.Attributes;
            if (cookie != null)
            {
                XmlAttribute pagingAttribute = doc.CreateAttribute("paging-cookie");
                pagingAttribute.Value = cookie;
                attributes.Append(pagingAttribute);
            }
            XmlAttribute pageAttribute = doc.CreateAttribute("page");
            pageAttribute.Value = System.Convert.ToString(page);
            attributes.Append(pageAttribute);
            XmlAttribute countAttribute = doc.CreateAttribute("count");
            countAttribute.Value = System.Convert.ToString(count);
            attributes.Append(countAttribute);
            StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder(1024);
            StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter(stringBuilder);
            XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter);
            doc.WriteTo(writer);
            writer.Close();
            return stringBuilder.ToString();
        }
        #endregion
    }

Connecting to D365 Using Xrm.Tooling Connector via Console App

One of the easiest way to connect to a Dynamics 365 CE instance, is to leverage the value of app.config.
Using the below configuration & just placing your organisation related values, you should be able to connect to D365 CE instance within a matter of minutes.

Ensure that the reference to the Microsoft Tooling Connector is added via nuget.
You can add this via nuget manager by searching for "Microsoft.CrmSdk.XrmTooling.CoreAssembly"  and pick up the one that is authored by either Microsoft or crmsdk.


Paste Below in app.config:

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="MyCDSServer" connectionString="AuthType=Office365;Url=http://some:8080/Test;UserName=someone@some.onmicrosoft.com;
  Password=passcode" />
</connectionStrings>


Below code from Main:

static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            CrmServiceClient serviceClient = new CrmServiceClient(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["connectionString"].ConnectionString);
            IOrganizationService service = serviceClient.OrganizationServiceProxy;
        }

D365 Exception: The plug-in type could not be found in the plug-in assembly

I recently faced an error stating "The plug-in type could not be found in the plug-in assembly" in an On-Premise environment.

The reason for this is, my target D365 instance was still on version 8.0 whereas the SDK assemblies (basically the nuget packages) that I was referring in my plugin were of version 9.0.



After downgrading the sdk dlls to 8.0(any version of 8.0 should work mostly), this issue was fixed and the plugin completed its operation as expected.

So, if you are facing this issue, you might have to ensure that your SDK assemblies are matching with that of your target D365 instance.

Where did my Settings menu go? New UCI on Dynamics 365

How to Access Settings menu in the new UCI App?

With recent updates to UCI, you might have wondered, how can you access the developer items like Customization, Process etc.

Well,

Its very simple. Just click on the Settings gear on the top right. And then select “Advanced Settings” and there you go.!!