One of the things I have always found frustrating about WCF is that it effectively hides the actual SOAP message XML requests and responses in web service calls. From a Dynamics CRM perspective, I can think of at least three good reasons it would be nice to be able to access the raw XML generated and consumed by clients built with the SDK: »
I think the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK is swell for interoperability, but I wanted to get a closer look at how the actual web service calls work, so I decided to access the sandbox CRM instance my company provides using a WSDL-based proxy as described here. Because the SDK has several examples for connecting to CRM instances using different kinds of authentication in the SDK\SampleCode\CS\WsdlBasedProxies directory, I figured this would be a piece of cake. »
A few weeks back, I wrote a post that showed how to retrieve and display FetchXML using jQuery in a Dynamics CRM web resource. In that example, I used jQuery’s each() method to iterate through each result and append them to an HTML element on the page. Using each() is a good approach if you need to actually do something with each row, but if you just want to display data, XSLT is a much easier way to do it. »
In part I of this series, I showed how to query Microsoft Dynamics CRM for aggregate data using FetchXML and then pass the results to Flot to generate a line chart. In this second part, I will expand on that to show how to query for and chart multi-series data. For my example today, I will be creating a chart that shows the number of contacts created by date and state (address, not statecode). »
Earlier this week I posted an entry about using FetchXML and JQuery in a Dynamics CRM 2011 web resource. The reason I first started looking at those two together was that I wanted to see if I could generate better looking line charts than are available out of the box (spoiler alert: I did). »