Category Archives: dynamics2011

Stunning Rich HTML e-mails with Dynamics CRM 2011 – Episode III

Finally here comes Episode III.

(Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead or the Star Wars saga, is purely coincidental.)

In case you missed previous episodes you can find them here and here.

Today we will see something pretty interesting and a common request: how can you make the e-mail template dynamic based on entity values or insert custom HTML code.

I’ll provide an example based on one of the requests I received in the comments, we will add a personal avatar to our users so we can insert it in our template.

Spoiler alert, the following screenshot is what we’re trying to achieve:

Dynamic email template with user avatar

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Stunning Rich HTML e-mails with Dynamics CRM 2011 – Episode II

Ok. Time for the next step.
At this point you would probably say: “Eh, you didn’t show anything new yet”.
That’s why here it comes the second part.
We will dig a bit into how our friend Dynamics translates its magic keywords, and how to use them in our e-mail template.

If you missed the first part you can read it here

Following the previous article you are now able to create a custom email template, but you are probably asking: “Every time I make a change in the template, I need to manually replace the text with dynammic properties, over and over again. Isn’t there a better way?”

Stunning Rich HTML e-mails with Dynamics CRM 2011 – Episode I

Today I’m gonna show you how to create rich html e-mails with MS Dynamics CRM 2011.

You could find many articles around, but I wanted to share my method which proves to be quite complete. This will be the first part of a series of articles which will cover also CRM slugs injected by form assistant and how to insert dynamically generated images/sections.

1. First step: brainstorming the e-mail template

I usually start by creating an html page to test my template until I’m satisfied with it.

Here’s a sample. (Ok I discovered one of the most popular searches on Google is about kitten so I hope to reach a wider audience with this kitten based newsletter!).

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The record could not be deleted because of an association

Dear Dynamics 2011 developers, here is my first article about Microsoft CRM development. I hope to write more while I follow the development of a new CRM project.

Since I’m a beginner in this field, the first articles will be about problems I’m facing in setting up and configuring Dynamics.

So here it comes, after trying to write calendar rules of an equipment, failing miserably, it happened we were not able to view the service calendar and other service related entities including the equipment owner of the corrupted calendar. Since we’re in early development we decided to delete the equipment and recreate it, but surprise surprise, our friend CRM won’t allow it.

So we faced the creepy message: “The record could not be deleted because of an association”.

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