Tag: leads

Active or inactive, that is the question?!?!

Catchy title, right? Well I was wondering what exactly I should use for this blog post, and as you’ll see as we go through things, this is probably quite a good paraphrase to use.

So, where to start? Well, with a customer, of course! Now, this customer has been running live with a custom Dynamics 365 solution for a little while. Importantly for this story, there have not been ANY releases in quite a few months. This is of course good to bear in mind, given that we can all, um, occasionally find that a release could cause an issue, somewhere, sometimes…

Part of the capabilities that they’re using is bringing in Leads, and qualifying them appropriately. As part of this process, there are various custom attributes (aka columns) that have been added to the Lead table, along with corresponding columns added to the Contact table. There’s also some custom logic that, when a lead is qualified, copies the values from Lead to Contact record, updating it (essentially extending the standard capabilities of the system).

This has all been working well to date, and the customer team has been very happy with their system. Until it stopped working, last week. Which was strange, as nothing seemed to have changed at all?

When trying to qualify leads in the system, they were getting the following error message:

Cryptic, right? This seemed a little more interesting as well, given that when only inputting basic information into a Lead record (eg First Name, Last Name, Phone Number), it didn’t matter how many leads existed with the same information, it qualified without a problem.

However, using any custom columns that had been added to the table caused this error to occur.

The first thing that I did was to check that there had been no updates released to Production. This was confirmed as being the case. I then also checked that there had been no OTHER solutions released to Production (as this could have impacted on it). Thankfully there hadn’t – the system looked to be in as fine a shape as it’s been running for a while.

OK – on to the next step. What updates have been released by Microsoft? Well, with the fact that we were able to pinpoint the date that the functionality had stopped working, we went to find the corresponding Learn article about the release (Update 22102 – Release Notes | Microsoft Learn). Don’t worry about clicking through to read it – there’s essentially not much in it, and there’s nothing at all around the Lead table or its functionality!

Continuing to dig around, I really wasn’t sure of what was causing this, but obviously had to work it out & figure out a fix! It was quite a dilemna.

This is where the amazing Microsoft community came into play. I noticed a post by Jeroen Scheper on one of the channels that I’m on. It turns out that he was having the same issues, so we started to try collaborate on it. This both reassured me (that it wasn’t just me), but also increased the confusion, as we couldn’t work out what was going on underneath to cause this!

Raising with Microsoft (we both actually raised support incidents), I had an amazing support call almost immediately. Demonstrating the problem, I was told that it was due to Duplicate Detection rules.

Now I’ll admit that this confused me somewhat. See, I had already checked the Duplicate Detection rules, but nothing had been changed, and no new rules had been implemented.

Getting the support agent to walk me through things, they told me that I had to unpublish the rules, modify a setting on them, and then re-publish the rules. This was the setting (on each one) that had to be updated:

This again caused me to be confused. Why was the system having issues with inactive records? Surely qualified leads are active records, but just qualified (& then being locked down as a result)?

Well, it turns out that my perspective of how this works is actually incorrect. As we (hopefully) all know, whilst all records have a Status value (eg Active, Inactive), there are some records that also have a Status Reason value.

In fact, the ‘State Code’ choice value in Dataverse is restricted (we can’t access it), and seems to have some quite interesting functionality running behind it. Depending on which table is accessed, there are different options available within it.

For example, the Lead table shows:

Whereas the Contact table shows:

And the Task table shows:

Anyhow – it turns out that when a Lead record is qualified or disqualified, though it’s not shown in the user interface (nor behind the scenes), the record is actually being deactivated!

More information on this can be found at Qualify and convert leads to opportunity | Microsoft Learn.

So, this was the underlying reason behind the error message. Obviously Microsoft had updated something, which then caused this to fail. I don’t know how many different customers may have been (or still be?) experiencing the issue, but I think that the error message at least could be a little clearer? Perhaps including a link to the relevant Microsoft documentation page, for a start.

Well, thankfully this was put to bed, and I was quite thankful (as was the customer). And this is how I decided to come up with the title of this blog post!

Have you ever had something similar happen to you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Working with Opportunity Close table

I’ve recently had the experience of working with the Opportunity Close functionality within Dynamics 365, and given what occurred, thought it would be useful to document this so that others are able to see this as well. There are many scenarios in which we’d use this, and being able to give a comprehensive solution to clients does make all of the difference!

There are three areas that I’d like to cover:

  • Working with Opportunity Close table
  • Challenges with data
  • Power Automate to the rescue!
  • Caveats

So let’s get started then!

Thanks to various members of the community such as Matt Collins-Jones, Andrew Bibby & others, who helped me along the way

Working with Opportunity Close

The Opportunity Close functionality within Dynamics 365 (& yes, I’m going to refer to it as this, rather than Power Platform) is used to provide information around why an opportunity is being closed. This is regardless of whether the opportunity has been won, or it’s been lost. It’s still quite important to track the information around it, so that companies can understand better how the market views the products it offers, how it stacks up against others, etc.

The default path in the system is to create a lead, and then qualify it. Qualifying a lead then automatically creates an opportunity record, which further information (quotes, etc) can be entered against. An account record (if company information is specified) is also created:

Updated Solution Release: Lead Qualification Version 2.0.0 for Microsoft Dynamics 365

On the opportunity record, users are able to show if it’s been won or lost by clicking an appropriate button on the toolbar:

Doing this brings up the Opportunity Close pane on the right hand side of the screen:

Now it’s possible to customise this screen. In fact, the screenshot above shows 3 custom columns that have been added to it already in the system I was in.

To do this, we go to customise the solution (in the Maker Experience), and add the column/s that we’re wanting to:

Next, we need to remember to add it to the form! Otherwise it’s not going to show up. If we’re wanting it to appear on the side bar, then it’s important to customise the ‘Quick Create’ form version, to make our customisations show up.

Note: We’re able to put conditional visibility of the column/s if we want to, based on whether the opportunity is won or lost, using Business Rules. I haven’t done so in this scenario, but you’re obviously able to do so if you want to

Remember to save & publish the form, and then it’ll display within the system for users. Brilliant!

Challenges with data

So we’ve gone ahead & created the custom columns, and users are actually using them to record data. Wonderful – that’s exactly what we’ve been wanting to achieve.

OK – let’s now review the data so that we can see overall what’s happened with our opportunities. Of course we’re wanting to do this simply & easily, so we’ll open an Advanced Find window, go to the Opportunity Close table, add columns from the associated Opportunity, and….hold on. Opportunity Close ISN’T displaying in the Advanced Find????

It’s just NOT there. In case you’re wondering if you saved/published things correctly, or forgot some system setting, stop worrying. It’s not you – it’s the system.

See, Opportunity Close, though a table in its own right, is a SPECIAL sort of table. It doesn’t show up, and can’t be directly queried. I know – frustrating. I felt exactly the same way.

On digging deeper into things, I found out that there’s actually an activity record saved. It’s possible to query against this:

However, and this is the BIG catch, it’s NOT possible to return custom columns when carrying out this query. The search will ONLY return the (system) columns that are present for activities. So this leaves us with a problem.

Essentially, though we can set up custom columns to track the data that we’re needing to, it’s not possible (through the front end) to query it. This sort of negates what we’re trying to achieve here overall, and is a pain.

So what’s the way round it? Well, it’s actually going to be Power Automate!

Power Automate to the rescue

In order to handle our issue, what we need to do is the following:

  • Add custom columns to the Opportunity table (these should mimic the custom columns that we’ve added to the Opportunity Close table)
  • Use Power Automate for automation purposes!

The first step is easy. We need to go & create custom columns on the Opportunity table. These WILL show up in the Advanced Find search. They obviously need to be the same as the custom columns on the Opportunity Close table. If we’ve used Choice or Choices there, point the Opportunity column to the same source (it’s a good argument for using Global, rather than Local, choice/s).

We then can go and create a Power Automate. This should trigger when an Opportunity Close record is created.

Note: For this, I’ve made it so that it runs under the user triggering the action, rather than a system account. This is to keep in line with licensing limits etc

You’ll then need to add a ‘Get Dataverse row’ step, and get the Opportunity Close record that has just been created. This is annoying, but for some strange reason the trigger doesn’t present the custom columns/values in the JSON that it returns. Hopefully Microsoft fixes this at some point, but for the moment, we need to work around it.

The last step is to add a ‘Update Dataverse row’. This should point to the Opportunity table, & we can simply map the values across (from the SECOND step, NOT the first one – VERY IMPORTANT).

Once this is all done, save & test it, and you should see it working. I generally don’t add the Opportunity custom columns to the form, but rather leave them for querying against.

Caveats

It’s important to keep in mind that when an opportunity is marked as either won or lost, it’s then closed, and changed to a read-only state. That’s how the system is designed to be, and makes sense.

However it’s ALSO possible to re-activate a closed opportunity, and then close it again. Ie a single Opportunity record could have multiple Opportunity Close records against it. This solution won’t handle this (it would need to be built out further – the Opportunity record itself will only show the values from the latest Opportunity Close action, so please do keep this in mind!

Have you ever come up against something like this? How have you handled it? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment!