Finally we have Column Comparison in FetchXml, SDK and OData!

Microsoft has made an announcement and finally we have Column Comparison available using FetchXml, SDK and OData.

Now we will be able to perform column comparisons for the Common Data Service. Column comparisons will also work in the Power Apps expression language with CDS version 9.1.0000.19562 or later.

We can perform a column comparison for the following condition operators using FetchXML, Web API, or the SDK API:

• Equal
• NotEqual
• GreaterThan
• GreaterEqual
• LessThan
• LessEqual

Columns comparison using FetchXML:

<fetch>

  <entity name='contact' >

    <attribute name='firstname' />

    <filter>

      <condition attribute='firstname' operator='eq' valueof='lastname'/>

    </filter>

  </entity>

</fetch>

Columns comparison using Web Api:

https://<environment-root>/contacts?$select=firstname&$filter=firstname eq lastname

Columns comparison using SDK Api & Organization Service:

public ConditionExpression
(
  string attributeName,
  ConditionOperator conditionOperator,
  bool compareColumns,
  object value
)

public ConditionExpression
(
  string attributeName,
  ConditionOperator conditionOperator,
  bool compareColumns,
  object[] values
)

Following link provide more details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/common-data-service/column-comparison

Premjit Singh
Attendite Ltd.
Twitter

Resolve Error "Unable to Login to Dynamics CRM" after v9 update

Recently we have updated our Dynamics 365 to v9 and we are updating our applications to the latest version of SDK.

As per Microsoft Guideline, approach is to update apps to .NET Framework 4.6.2 and update CRM SDK to latest v9.0 assemblies. But application was still throwing same error message ("Unable to Login to Dynamics CRM").

One of my colleague pointed to a David Branscome's Post about moving away from TLS 1.0 and 1.1 to 1.2 and it reminded me about the post I read few days back.

Because our .NET assemblies were already updated so version 4.6.2 and it should be handling the TLS Protocol issue itself. But our application was still throwing the same error so we decided to try invoke TLS1.2 manually in our application before CrmServiceClient is instantiated. Following line was added to the code:

ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12;

But it was still throwing same error and then we started looking at assembly references and app.config. In config we found that targetFramework was pointing to 4.5.2 and it worked when we changed to 4.6.2 (as shown below). Once it is updated connection will was created without any issue.

<httpRuntime targetFramework="4.6.2" />

Premjit Singh
Attendite Ltd.
Twitter