The duration of the appointment is invalid

If you need to change the maximum value you are able to do this directly in the database (which is officially supported – quote of a support ticket below).

• There is no way to modify the limit for service duration via UI. We will read this value from a SQL table and there we can change the default setting.

  Database: [Organization]_MSCRM

  Table: OrganizationBase

  Field: MaxAppointmentDurationDays

  Default value: 10

• If you overwrite this value with the needed one (for example 20) and after that perform an IISReset, the known error message (“The duration of the appointment is invalid”) will no longer occur.

  This change is the recommended solution from Microsoft CRM Support and will be supported.

• Background: This field does come originally from CRM 3.0, where customer already provided feedback that the maximum duration of 10 days does not meet their need. The solution for CRM 3.0 was a solution implementation via registry key: Navigate to the following registry hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM. Create a registry key of type DWORD and name it “SchedulingEngine.MaxAppointmentDurationDays”. Provide a reasonable digit greater than 10 representing the number of days the service activity would be kept open and insure that the value is set to Decimal and not Hexadecimal. Now you can schedule an appointment with a duration value of more than 10 days.
• For CRM 4.0 you will need a manual change of the according OrganisationBase entry. Exception: If you upgrade your CRM installation from CRM 3.0 to CRM4.0, the value will be automatically carried over

Another possibility to adjust this setting is to change the organization.maxappointmentdurationdays Property via the sdk.

However, Dynamics CRM allows you to create your own id for a record. The primary key of a record is stored in its Key-Property. On all default entities, for example account, the id property is marked as Valid for create (see accountid). This means, the sdk allows you to pass your own id.

using System;
using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk;
 
namespace PreCreateKeyPlugin
{
    public class PreCreateKeyPlugin : IPlugin
    {
        public void Execute(IPluginExecutionContext context)
        {
            if (IsPreCreate(context))
            {
                if (context.InputParameters.Contains(ParameterName.Target))
                {
                    DynamicEntity target = context.InputParameters[ParameterName.Target] as DynamicEntity;
 
                    if (target != null)
                    {
                        Guid customId = new Guid("{d7256b93-a5b5-45f9-9f2d-a1838279c35c}");
 
                        target["accountid"] = new Key(customId);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
 
        private bool IsPreCreate(IPluginExecutionContext context)
        {
            return  context.MessageName == MessageName.Create && 
                    context.Stage == MessageProcessingStage.BeforeMainOperationOutsideTransaction;
        }
    }
}

If you register this plugin for pre-create on the account entity and create a new account, it will have the provided id.

Please keep in mind, that you are in the responsibility to assign an new GUID for every execution of this plugin, but this should be clear when working with primary keys.

function GetFieldLabel(fieldname)
{
  var field = crmForm.all[fieldname+ '_c'];
 
  if (field != null){
    return field.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
  }
  else {
    return '';
  }
}
 
alert(GetFieldLabel('subject'));

The other option is, to retrieve the label for the user language from the crm service. I will cover this in another article.

For example, if you integrate a web application with an IFrame, you have to set different addresses for internal and external access. Or, if the application is only accessible from inside your network, you can show a message that it is not available for external users.

With help of Form Scripting you can detect an external request with little effort. You can make use of the function prependOrgName(”) which adds the organization prefix to the argument, if it is necessary. That means for an external request, it returns always the argument which you have passed.

function IsExternalRequest() 
{
  var ifdTestValue = prependOrgName('');
  var isIFDCall = ifdTestValue == '';
 
  return isIFDCall;
}

Calling IsExternalRequest will return true, if the request comes from an external network range. You could also define this function globally in the form context (see also http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=JS5)

IsExternalRequest = function() 
{
  var ifdTestValue = prependOrgName('');
  var isIFDCall = ifdTestValue == '';
 
  return isIFDCall;
}

A quick search in the internet revealed that this error message is not an unknown one (at least for Dynamics CRM 3)

• http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2007/05/error-when-creating-new-appointment.html
• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/917010/en-us

Because the description of the articles were not suitable for the customers environment and the CRM system is a newer one ( Dynamics CRM 4), we had to dig further.

We enabled the tracing on the crm application server and set the TraceCategories to *:Error which writes only the message with TraceLevel Error to the trace file.

The generated trace file contained following error
...
Crm Exception: Message: SecLib::CrmCheckPrivilege failed. Returned hr = -2147220960 on UserId: bcf9bb2e-6070-de11-a4a6-000c29abeb6c and PrivilegeId: b5f2ee06-d359-4495-bbda-312aae1c6b1e, ErrorCode: -2147220960
...
MessageProcessor fail to process message 'Book' for 'appointment'.
...


A quick search for the name of the denied privilege showed that the security role of the user doesn’t give him the right to share appointments. Apparently, this right is needed for creating an appointment. After adjusting the security role the error was gone and the customer was happy.

Once you have loaded the marketing list, for which you want to retrieve the members, you have to find out of what type the members are. The type of the members is stored in the membertype property of the marketing list.

Following method returns the name of the member entity type

internal string GetMemberType(CrmNumber crmNumber)
{
    switch (crmNumber.Value)
    {
        case ListType.Account:
            return EntityName.account.ToString();
        case ListType.Contact:
            return EntityName.contact.ToString();
        case ListType.Lead:
            return EntityName.lead.ToString();
        default:
            break;
    }
}

With this information we can create the query expression which we use to retrieve the list members.

BusinessEntityCollection RetrieveMembers(list marketinglist)
{
 
 string targetEntity = GetMemberType(marketinglist.membertype);
 
 QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression
 {
   EntityName = targetEntity;
   ColumnSet = new AllColumns();
 };
 
 // link from target entity to listmember
 LinkEntity linkToListMemberEntity = new LinkEntity
 {
   LinkFromEntityName = EntityName.account.ToString();
   LinkFromAttributeName = targetEntity + "id";
   LinkToEntityName = EntityName.listmember.ToString();
   LinkToAttributeName = "entityid";
 };
 
 //link from listmember to list
 LinkEntity linkToMarketingList = new LinkEntity
 {
   LinkFromEntityName = EntityName.listmember.ToString();
   LinkFromAttributeName = "listid";
   LinkToEntityName = EntityName.list.ToString();
   LinkToAttributeName = "listid";
 };
 
 // filter result with the id of the marketing list
 ConditionExpression marketingListIdCondition = new ConditionExpression
 {
   AttributeName = "listid";
   Operator = ConditionOperator.Equal;
   Values = new [] { marketinglist.listid.Value };
 };
 
 linkToMarketingList.LinkCriteria = new FilterExpression();
 linkToMarketingList.LinkCriteria.Conditions.Add(marketingListIdCondition);
 
 linkToListMemberEntity.LinkEntities.Add(linkToMarketingList);
 
 query.LinkEntities.Add(linkToListMemberEntity);
 
 BusinessEntityCollection members = service.RetrieveMultiple(query);
 
 return members;
}