Lessons Learned
How to fix a messed up picklist
One particularly nasty “feature” of the Data Migration Wizard (DMM) is that if you leave the box labeled “to accommodate the source data, automatically customize Microsoft Dynamics CRM list values and length of attributes” in its default checked position, it will create new picklist entries EVEN IF they already exist.
so e.g. if you have a name/value [...]
Importing completed
Whew. Lessons learned:
Leave that friggin’ first checkbox UNCHECKED. damn.
Do things in the smallest possible increments so that you don’t invest a lot of time only to find out it’s not working.
If possible, do all the manipulation on your end before you import. e.g.: I had “M/F” for gender in my db but MS wants 1/2. [...]
Delete migrated data doesn’t delete migrated data
If the migration creates new picklist entries, running through the “delete migrated data” process is microsoft CRM does NOT delete the newly created picklist entries.
better watch out for that checkbox! IMO they should leave it UNCHECKED by default because the worst that will happen is you’ll get error messages if you mistakenly leave it unchecked.
but [...]
Do over on the do over
This is why developers can sometimes spend hours and get so little done: I’m re-doing the creation of the PAU entity only to discover now that you can ONLY create an nvarchar primary attribute.
So it was a waste of time to delete the other one. crap.
do-over entity setup
when I created my PAU entity I should have paid closer attention. the primary attribute it created was an nvarchar and I really need it to be an INT. reason is that my soon-to-be-uploaded primary key is INT and want that to be the same as the entity field I created.
oh well. that’s why folks [...]
Watch those 1:N relationships
Gotta do over. One PAU has many members. That’s a 1:N. Inside the PAU, I erroneously created a N:1 relationship thinking “many members to 1 pau” but that’s now how it went.
The “1″ really means “current attribute” so what I should have chosen was 1:N.
Getting custom entities to show on menu
This whole “reset your computer” philosophy has really permeated throughout Microsoft. I did get my custom entities to show. I had to exit out of MS crm and go back in. Now I see them.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Picklist import knowledge
My import worked! And I found out that:
You don’t have to map picklist values again (in a data map) after you’ve input them in in the attribute section.
You DO need to have all your possible picklist values defined otherwise you’ll get an error, and quite possibly the heading will be blank like it was for [...]
Found the missing picklist value
Definitely was a good idea to import a small sample list of 20 instead of my real list of 4000. I was able to identify all the picklist columns, then looked for what was different about the error row (I found that error row by comparing, 1 by 1, each row imported in CRM with [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Row 13 is really row 12
When you get an import error, the “original row” number includes the heading row of your import file. I had an error on row 13, so in my spreadsheet/csv file, I looked at row 14 as the problem row, which was 13 rows into the data file, row 1 being the heading.
But what I found [...]
