I had been asked by a client to generate a report, based on an Account, attach this report to an email and send this email as part of a workflow. My server setup was fairly standard; separate servers for the CRM front-end, back-end, database and reporting. The workflow would consist of a number of steps:

1. Create an email entity with the necessary content.
2. Run some custom workflow code to generate the report with the following Inputs. These would include the Email created as part of Step #1, the Report to generate and attach to the email, the Primary Contact for the Account and the URL to the report server.
3. Run some additional custom code to send the email with the following inputs

The problem I had to solve was that when I tried to generate the report in code using the ServerReport Render method I would get the following error:

An error has occurred during report processing (rsProcessingAborted)  Cannot create a connection to data source ‘CRM.’ (rsErrorOpeningConnection)  Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx).

As it turns out, this KB article gave me the clue to solving the problem. This error occurs in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 because the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Reporting Extensions requires the user’s SystemUserId value as the Log in name and the user’s OrganizationId value as the password. When a report runs inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM, these values are passed automatically. The OrganizationId and SystemUserId can be pulled from the IWorkflowContext interface.  I then needed to get details of the DataSource and apply the credentials. This can be done in a few easy steps:

1. Use the ServerReport GetDataSources method to retrieve the ReportDataSourceInfoCollection; since my reports only have one DataSource we can just pull the first item from the collection.
2. Create a DataSourceCredentials object to set the username (SystemUserId), password (OrganizationId) of the DataSource. Add that object to the DataSourceCredentialsCollection.
3. Use the ServerReport SetDataSourceCredentials method to apply the credentials to the ServerReport.

The code snippet below provides a bit more detail on the information from these steps.

ReportViewer viewer = new ReportViewer();
			
Warning[] warnings;
string[] streamids;
string mimeType;
string encoding;
string fileExt;

ActivityMimeAttachment attachment = new ActivityMimeAttachment()
{
    MimeType = "application/octet-stream",
    FileName = attachmentName
};	

viewer.ServerReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri(reportServerUrl);
viewer.ServerReport.ReportPath = string.Format(@"/{0}_MSCRM/CustomReports/{1}", organisatioName, reportName);

ReportDataSourceInfoCollection reportDataSources = viewer.ServerReport.GetDataSources();
if (reportDataSources == null || reportDataSources.Count == 0)
{
    throw new InvalidPluginExecutionException(string.Format("The report {0} does not contain a valid datasource", reportName));
}
DataSourceCredentials dsc = new DataSourceCredentials() { Name = reportDataSources[0].Name, Password = organisationId.ToString(), UserId = systemUserId.ToString() };
DataSourceCredentialsCollection dscc = new DataSourceCredentialsCollection();
dscc.Add(dsc);

viewer.ServerReport.SetDataSourceCredentials(dscc);
viewer.ServerReport.SetParameters(reportParams);
viewer.ServerReport.Refresh();

byte[] bytes = viewer.ServerReport.Render("PDF", null, out mimeType, out encoding, out fileExt, out streamids, out warnings);
attachment.Body = Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);

I was experiencing this error when trying to update an existing solution with a new version. It didn’t really tell me much and the changes I had made in this version of the solution were only minor. The other odd thing was that a number of my colleagues using the same CRM server were experiencing other issues performing their own operations. A couple of them were receiving this error:

System.ServiceModel.FaultException: The formatter threw an exception while trying to deserialize the message: There was an error while trying to deserialize parameter http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts/Services:request.

After trying the obvious of restarting services, I decided to turn on the trace functionality in CRM, specifically looking at the Platform_Import category, and ran my import process again. As expected it failed, so I searched the trace file for the error shown in my Import log file – Error deserializing XAML – and further along the error I found this message:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerRuntime, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’ or one of its dependencies

I have come across this error before when using other assembly’s with CRM so the solution was to add the missing assembly to the CRMWeb\bin folder on the CRM web server. This time, running the import again successfully updated the solution as well as solving other problems that were being experienced by my colleagues using the same server.

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Having installed the CRM 2011 Email Router on the server and configured the Incoming and Outgoing server options when I came to ‘Test Access’ I got the following error in both test results:

Incoming Status: Failure - Type 'System.ServiceModel.Channels.ReceivedFault' in Assembly
'System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' 
is not marked as serializable.

To solve this problem I had to do two things:

1. I changed the router service account (the account that is configured to run the email router service) to a valid domain user.
2. Since I was using the Access Credentials of Other Specified for the profiles the router service account needed to be added to the PrivUserGroup.

Once I had made these changes and restarted my CRM Email Router Service then the Test Access dialog indicated that both Incoming and Outgoing profiles had succeeded.

When you create an Activity within Microsoft CRM 2011 using the web client it appears as if you get additional fields in the Details section that are not available when using the Outlook 2010 client. For example, my users wanted to be able to populate the Duration field when they complete an email so they can report on time against a particular client, account and/or case.

Fortunately the fields in the Details section are available within the Outlook 2010 client for CRM 2011 you just have to know how to find them.

• Open up a new email message from within Outlook
• On the Message tab of the ribbon bar is a Show button. Click this button to reveal an option to show the CRM Fields for an email (See image below)

• If you haven’t already set the email as ‘Tracked’ within CRM you will receive an informational message (See image below)

• Just click on the Track button on the Message tab of the new email ribbon and you should see the Details section containing the additional fields within CRM. (See image below)

• You can even customise the Details section of the Email entity form to add more fields to this section including your own fields.