CRM – Nishant Rana's Weblog

Reset / Restore the standard (OOTB) button in Dynamics 365 / Dataverse

We recently worked on a requirement where we customized an out-of-the-box ribbon button in Dynamics 365 — specifically, the Reactivate Lead button. We had renamed it to ‘Reactivate’ as part of an earlier customization.

Below is how the button appeared on the form after customization:

Later, we had a new requirement to hide this button completely and replace it with a custom ribbon button that implemented our own reactivation logic. However, when we tried to hide the button using Ribbon Workbench, we noticed that the Hide option was not available.

When we opened Ribbon Workbench and inspected the button, we observed that since the button was already customized, the standard options like Hide were no longer available.

While working within the same Ribbon Workbench session, we could see the ‘Uncustomize Button’ option.

However, an interesting behavior we observed is that once we closed or reopened the solution inside the Ribbon Workbench, the ‘Uncustomise Button’ option was no longer available. In that case, only the Delete option was visible.

This is expected behavior. Once an OOTB button is customized, it becomes part of the solution layer, and certain default actions like Hide are no longer directly available.

To fix this and restore the original behavior, we followed a simple approach.

We selected the customized button in Ribbon Workbench and chose the Uncustomize Button or Delete option. We then published the solution and reloaded it. Once the solution was reloaded, the button was restored to its original out-of-the-box state. And now, the Hide option was available again as expected.

This allowed us to properly hide the OOTB button and proceed with implementing our custom ribbon button.

We referred to the blog below, which helped confirm the approach: https://innovativeaj.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/bring-me-back-to-life-restoring-the-d365-ootb-button-to-default-version/

Hope it helps..

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The Attribute with id does not exist — and Staged Metadata is still being processed (Dataverse / Dynamics 365 Issue)

Last week, we came across a strange issue while working with Dataverse metadata.

We had created a new attribute as part of our solution changes. Everything looked fine initially, and the attribute was created successfully without any errors. However, when we tried to delete that same attribute, we started getting an error saying that the attribute does not exist.

This was confusing for us because the attribute clearly existed and was visible in the system.

“The Attribute with ID doesnt not exist”

To validate further, we tried adding the same attribute to another solution. This time, we received a different error stating that the staged metadata for the attribute is still being processed.

The staged metadata for Attribute is still being processed, please wait before you can do any update/delete/retrieve operations.

At this point, it was clear that this was not a normal behavior. It felt like the attribute was stuck in an intermediate state where it was created but not fully available for operations.

We checked the Known Issues list in the Power Platform Admin Center and found a matching issue: https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/knownissues/6269936

We applied the suggested fix mentioned there, but it did not work immediately for us. Instead of trying multiple workarounds, we decided to wait for some time and raised a support ticket.

After a couple of hours, we retried the same operations. This time, both deleting the attribute and adding it to another solution worked without any issues.

The key takeaway from this experience is simple.

If we encounter errors like: – Attribute does not exist (even though it does) – Staged metadata is still being processed

It is worth giving the system some time before trying again and/or raising a support ticket in parallel instead of wasting time trying different options to fix it.

Hope it helps..

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“Transaction not started. There is no active transaction” error (Dynamics 365 / Dataverse)

We recently ran into an interesting and slightly frustrating issue while trying to mark an activity (Appointment/Phone Call/ Task) as Completed in Dynamics 365.

Whenever we tried to mark the activity as completed, we were getting the following error. We were only getting the exception when the activity was owned by a Team instead of a User.

Error Code: 0x80040251 Message: “There is no active transaction. This error is usually caused by custom plug-ins that ignore errors from service calls and continue processing.”

At this point, we were quite confident that this was related to some custom logic interfering with the transaction pipeline. The error message itself clearly hinted towards plug-ins swallowing exceptions and continuing execution.

So, we started with the usual debugging checklist:

Checked all synchronous plug-ins on Activity, Appointment, and related entities. Disabled custom plug-ins one by one. Looked into ownership/team-related logic. Assigned System Admin role to the Team, etc.

Surprisingly, even after disabling all plug-ins, the issue was still occurring. That was our first big clue that something else was at play.

After wasting good enough time, we shifted our attention towards workflows and custom workflow activities. And that’s where things got interesting.

We found a custom workflow activity that had a try-catch block implemented like this:

The exception was being caught… but not thrown again. Essentially, the workflow activity was swallowing the exception silently and allowing execution to continue.

This behavior breaks the transaction pipeline. Dynamics expects failures to bubble up properly so that the transaction can be rolled back. When exceptions are consumed like this, the platform ends up in an inconsistent state, which is why we see errors like ‘There is no active transaction’.

We started first by updating the code to rethrow the exception, that’s where we realized the actual error – which was a SystemUser record does not exist. Basically in our code we were assigning Team Guid’s to a lookup of type System User causing this issue.

After getting to know the exact issue, we updated our logic accordingly to fix the issue.

Key takeaway from this experience:

We should never suppress exceptions in plug-ins or custom workflow activities without proper handling. If something fails in the pipeline, it is better to let it fail cleanly rather than leaving the system in a broken transactional state.

Hope it helps..

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Fixed: Audit History Page Not Loading (Dataverse / Dynamics 365)

Recently, we ran into an issue where the Audit History page stopped loading on the form. Interestingly, the problem was limited only to the Account forms.

Whenever we tried to open Audit History, we received the generic error below:

An error has occurred.

Try this action again. If the problem continues, check the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Community for solutions or contact your organization’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Administrator. Finally, you can contact Microsoft Support.

A screenshot of a computer

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

To investigate further, we raised a Microsoft Support ticket. After reviewing the issue, Microsoft informed us that the problem was likely related to a custom control used on the Account form. They shared the Form ID (GUID) along with the control classid F9A8A302-114E-466A-B582-6771B2AE0D92, which corresponds to that custom control.

Microsoft asked us to inspect the Form XML of the affected Account form. Specifically, they advised searching for all controls that use the given classid and carefully reviewing the uniqueid property of each control. We were also asked to verify that there were no case mismatches in the GUIDs and that every uniqueid had a matching entry in the controldescription section of the Form XML.

To identify the correct form, we used a SQL4CDS query to retrieve the Form Name and Form ID.

For easier analysis, we created a temporary solution, added the affected Account form to it, exported the solution, and opened the Form XML.

While reviewing the Form XML, we found six instances of the control using the specified classid. For five of these controls, the uniqueid had a corresponding entry in the controldescription section. However, one control was missing this mapping. The problematic uniqueid was 815D8A5B-6355-47B5-9500-EE2D658820D5.

To resolve the issue, we updated this uniqueid to match an existing and valid one already present for the address1_line1 control, which was f9f5f514-a6f9-4e5f-bed9-e53516880ede. After making the change, we zipped the solution, imported it back into the environment, and published the updates.

More on that Address Input Control – https://www.axazure.com/en/how-to-use-the-new-address-input-control-in-model-driven-app

Once the solution was re-imported, the Audit History page started working correctly for Account forms, confirming that the issue was resolved.

This could be helpful if you run into a similar Audit History issue caused by custom controls and Form XML inconsistencies.

Hope it helps..

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Fixed – Error occurred while loading document template / Error occurred while loading preview error in Dynamics 365

Recently, one of the users reported the following error while trying to generate a PDF for a Quote record in Dynamics 365:

Initially, the Export to PDF option was showing a blank list of templates.

This happened because the user was missing a few essential privileges on the Document Template tables.

To fix the blank template list, we updated the user’s custom security role with the appropriate privileges on the following tables:

Document Template
Personal Document Template

After adding these, the templates started appearing in the “Export to PDF” dialog.

Even though the templates were now visible, the user still got the following error while trying to preview or export:

This was due to one missing privilege in the Customization area of the security role.

We added: DocumentGeneration privilege

Once this privilege was granted, the preview and PDF generation started working as expected.

If we are unsure which privilege might be missing in similar situations, a quick way to find out is by using Developer Tools (F12) and monitoring the Network tab while reproducing the error. The failed request, such as ExportPdfDocument, usually reveals the missing privilege directly in its Response section (for example, missing prvDocumentGeneration privilege). This saves time and avoids trial and error when troubleshooting permission issues.

Hope it helps..

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Fixed –Lookup value plugintypeexportkey [Guid] is not resolvable – Solution Import error (Dynamics 365 / Dataverse)

Recently, we faced an interesting import failure while moving a solution containing a Custom API.

Solution “Temp Plugin Step Custom API Transfer” failed to import: Lookup value 8f3269b7-a24d-43e4-9319-0c5e7ddf2b53 is not resolvable.

This clearly pointed to a lookup resolution issue — the solution import process was trying to bind the Custom API to a Plugin Type (class), but couldn’t find the referenced plugin in the target environment.

Each Custom API will have its own folder inside the Solution.

Looking into the solution files (specifically the customapi.xml) of that particular Custom API, we found this section:

Notice the <plugintypeexportkey> tag. This is where the Custom API references the Plugin Type (the actual C# class implementing the logic).

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AI-generated content may be incorrect.

When a Plugin class is created in Dynamics 365, it gets assigned a unique Plugin Type Id (GUID).

In the source environment, the Custom API was tied to a plugin with ID 420c7261-7461-4b37-87f0-1afcec427a46. However, in the destination environment, which was another development environment, a different plugin class was already created for that custom api. So during solution import, Dataverse tried to match the GUID 420c7261… but couldn’t find it in the target environment. Hence, the lookup resolution failed, and the solution import was blocked.

To resolve this, we manually updated the GUID in the customapi.xml to match the Plugin Type Id of the destination environment. Below, we are getting the ID from the Plugin Registration tool. The other option to fix would have been to remove the Plugin reference from the source, export, and then import.