New feature in Connector for Microsoft Dynamics V3 CU2 allows for limited updating of Contact Info View items in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

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The new field, “Allow Contact Info View Updates” is used to enable updates to existing Contact Info View items. After generating Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 object config files, this field will show up in any Complex Types that contain a ContactInfoView field. Leveraging this new field will allow you to update your Contact Info View items in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 with data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, but there are a few known issues to consider.

Only Primary and Private Checkboxes will be persisted after an update

For example, the Mobile Phone Checkbox will be unchecked after an update of any Phone type item. List of checkboxes that will not be persisted:

  • Phone
    • Mobile
  • Email
    • Instant Message
    • Instant Messenger sign-in

The Contact to Contact Persons Service map will need to be updated to only contain one mapping of the “Other” role for Phone

As written, only Home Phone or Mobile Phone in Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be written into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. If both Home Phone and Mobile Phone are needed to be mapped, Mobile Phone could be updated to role “Other;SMS”. Example: =GetContactInfo(Mobile Phone, "Phone", false, "Other;SMS")

Updating a Contact Info View item requires an exact match on Roles

For example, Contact to Contact Persons Service expects the Primary Phone to have a role of “Business”. If you have a record with a Primary Phone with the roles “Business;SMS”, the map will not be able to find a match and will create duplicates of the Primary Phone every time the map runs as the new item will not be set as Primary. If the role mismatch is on a non-primary item, the duplicate will only be created once.

There are two ways to work around this last behavior

1)      Remove “Role” from the ContactInfoView collection’s MatchField attribute in the object config files. This will cause all Roles to be overwritten on updates.

2)      Update the Map or Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Data to ensure a match on Roles. As Roles are not mapped from Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, this is only suggested when the data in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 will not be modified. Using option 1 temporarily is a fast way to change all the Contact Info View items in Microsoft Dynamics AX to expected Roles.

Note: Accounts and Contacts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM do not allow for custom child entities to be integrated using the default mappings in Connector for Microsoft Dynamics.