Author: Nishant Rana

We will go back to the basics and see one of the basic features of case entity which is confusing at times to the beginners, Merged Case vs. Child Case. What are they? Why and when to use them?

Merge Case:

What is Merged Case?

• When a case is merged, the state of the case is changed to cancelled, and the status is changed to merged. All of the open case activities, emails, and attachments that a case has are now associated with the case it is merged into.
• When you merge a case that has child cases, those child cases become child cases of the new parent case they get merged into.

How?

• 
• The unselected cases will be marked as canceled and will be mapped under the selected case.

Why and When?

• There are scenarios where a customer opens multiple cases about the same issue through different support channels…

As you are aware, using Plug-in Profiler option we can debug D365 online plug-ins by throwing exception and capturing the Serilaized profile. Refer my previous article

With the ‘Exception’ profiling option, you first need to trigger the event and capture the exception log. For example, if you need to debug “Post Account Create” plug-in, you first need to trigger the event (i.e., Create Account from D365 application) and capture the exception log. This ‘Exception’ option would be apt, if your plug-in registered in Sync mode.

What if your plug-in is Async? Answer is, using “Persist to Entity” profiler option.

Let’s see how to debug Async Plug-in step by step.

Configuring Profiler in Plugin Registration Tool:

• Connect to your Dynamics instance using Plug-in registration tool.
• Click on ‘Install Profiler’ button
• Register a new plug-in assembly and add an Async step
  • In this article, I registered an Async step on Post…

Here is a quick blog on how to access master & child records during a Merge operation in a plugin.

I recently had to develop a plugin where in I needed to do some manipulation with the records being merged.

You can access three entities in your plugin when a record is merged from Context.InputParameter : 

       1. SubordinateId – the duplicate record
       2. Target – the master record
       3. UpdateContent   – a temp entity contains the final attribute as outcome of the merge operation.

To Access them in the code simply do this:

Entity duplicate = context.InputParameters[“SubordinateId“]; // To access the duplicate record simply retrieve the attributes using service.retrieve and by proving the duplicate.Id.

EntityReference target= (EntityReference)context.InputParameters[“Target“];

Entity finalRecord = context.InputParameters[“UpdateContent“]; //To access the final record simply retrieve the attributes using service.retrieve and…