Technical thoughts on the open source Microsoft Dynamics CRM Framework for EPiServer – Part 2

In part 1 I gave an overview of how MS CRM entities and attributes, creating entity classes and creating CrmEntityControllers. This blog post will focus on the methods available through the CrmEntityController<T> class.

In the examples below we will assume that the CrmContact class from part 1 exists, so the only thing we need is a CrmControllerFactory and CrmEntityController<T> object:

CrmControllerFactory factory = CrmControllerFactory.Instance();

CrmEntityController<CrmContact> crmContactController = factory.GetEntityController<CrmContact>();

Creating a CRM entity

CrmEntityController<T>.Create(T entity) : Guid

Example:

CrmContact contact = new CrmContact();

contact.FirstName = "John";

contact.LastName = "Smith";

Guid contactGuid = crmContactController.Create(contact);

Reading a CRM entity

Get:

CrmEntityController<T>.Get(Guid entityId) : T

Example:

CrmContact contact = crmContactController.Get(guid);

FindAll:

CrmEntityController<T>.FindAll() : List<T>

CrmEntityController<T>.FindAll(CrmSortingCriteria sorting) : List<T>

Example:

List<CrmContact> contactList = crmContactController.FindAll();

 

List<CrmContact> sortedContactList = crmContactController.FindAll(new CrmSortingCriteria("firstname", CrmSortOrder.Ascending));

Find:

CrmEntityController<T>.Find(CrmQuery query) : List<T>

CrmEntityController<T>.Find(CrmQuery query, CrmSortingCriteria sorting) : List<T>

CrmEntityController<T>.Find(CrmQuery query, int page, int pageSize, out int totalCount, CrmSortingCriteria sorting) : List<T>

Example:

CrmQuery query = new CrmQuery();

query.AddCondition(new CrmAttributeCriterion("firstname", "John", CrmConditionOperator.Equal));

query.LogicalOperator = CrmLogicalOperator.Or;

query.AddCondition(new CrmAttributeCriterion("firstname", "Sarah", CrmConditionOperator.Equal));

 

List<CrmContact> contactList = crmContactController.Find(query);

 

List<CrmContact> sortedContactList = crmContactController.Find(query, new CrmSortingCriteria("firstname", CrmSortOrder.Ascending));

 

int totalCount;

List<CrmContact> pagedContactList = crmContactController.Find(query, 1, 10, out totalCount, null);

Updating a CRM entity

CrmEntityController<T>.Update(T entity)

Example:

CrmContact contact = crmContactController.Get(guid);

contact.FirstName = "Paul";

crmContactController.Update(contact);

Deleting a CRM entity

CrmEntityController<T>.Delete(Guid guid)

Example:

crmContactController.Delete(guid);

 

So these are the methods created so far, keep in mind that they might change! One of the things that definitely will change is the CrmQuery class. I’m not quite happy with that yet. So if you have any tips on how to create a good query system, please let me know :)