CreatedOn

The one common question that customer ask when migrating a system to D365 is about these audit field – how can we populate these values.

These are D365 audit field and its not straight forward to fill them with.

This is most commanly used field since most of the system like to maintain the actual created on date of record rather than the migrated one and that is why we have OOB support for this. There are two way to fill this:

OOB way of overridencreatedon
Plugin

D365 does provide a OOB to fill in the value in this field – but to fill this in we need to map overriddencreatedon field. Once a value is mapped to this field, it in turn populate CreatedOn. While the actual createdon date goes to OverriddenCreatedOn – as the decription of the field says :

CrmServiceClient client = new CrmServiceClient(connectionString);
Entity contact = new Entity("contact")
{
   Attributes = new AttributeCollection
   {
       new KeyValuePair<string, object>("lastname", "override created date"),
       new KeyValuePair<string, object>("overriddencreatedon", DateTime.Now.AddYears(-5))                    
   }
};
var res = client.Create(contact);

If however you use a pre-create/update plugin then the value createdon can be directly populated.

var target = this.PluginExecutionContext.InputParameters.ContainsKey("Target")
                               ? this.PluginExecutionContext.InputParameters["Target"] as Entity
                               : null;
if (PluginExecutionContext.MessageName.ToLower() == "create")
{
      target.Attributes["createdon"] = DateTime.Now.AddYears(-5);
}

CreatedBy, ModifiedBy

Coming to CreatedBy, ModifiedBy. There are 2 ways to fill in these values:

Impersonation
Plugin

So if you fill in the CallerId field of your client object as GUID of the user then these values can be set to that user.

CrmServiceClient client = new CrmServiceClient(connectionString);
client.CallerId = Guid.Parse("{1DBE94FB-BC4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}");// David So
Entity contact = new Entity("contact")
{
    Attributes = new AttributeCollection
    {
        new KeyValuePair<string, object>("lastname", "User Impersonation")
    }
};
var res = client.Create(contact);
client.CallerId = Guid.Parse("{8AEBAA01-BD4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}");//Renee Lo
client.Update(new Entity("contact")
{
    Id = res
});

Please note that the Created By(delegate) and Modified By(delegate) is the actual user on whose name the service object was created. We cannot overwrite these using application running outside CRM – like Console or SSIS.

The other way is to create a pre-create/update plugin and fill in the values.

    var target = this.PluginExecutionContext.InputParameters.ContainsKey("Target")
                               ? this.PluginExecutionContext.InputParameters["Target"] as Entity
                               : null;
    if (PluginExecutionContext.MessageName.ToLower() == "create")
    {
        target.Attributes["createdby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{1DBE94FB-BC4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}"));//David So
        target.Attributes["modifiedby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{3BBE94FB-BC4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}")); //Eric Gruber
        target.Attributes["createdonbehalfby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{8AEBAA01-BD4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}")); //Renee Lo
        target.Attributes["modifiedonbehalfby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{C6EBAA01-BD4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}")); //Mollly Clark
    }
    if (PluginExecutionContext.MessageName.ToLower() == "update")
    {
        target.Attributes["createdby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{4AEBAA01-BD4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}")); //Jeff Hay
        target.Attributes["modifiedby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{B3BD94FB-BC4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}")); //Alicia Thomber
        target.Attributes["createdonbehalfby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{B7BD94FB-BC4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}"));//Amy Albert
        target.Attributes["modifiedonbehalfby"] = new EntityReference("systemuser", Guid.Parse("{6CEBAA01-BD4E-EB11-A813-000D3A9BF8FB}")); //Karen Berg
    }

Same thing happens even on pre-update :

Do note thast plugin allow us to override even the delegate field however it isnt ideal to do that. Also updating modified by and modified on is also not encouraged since these value are suppose to updated by users modifying it and programtically updating it can cause loss of this information.

ModifiedOn

The last one is ModifiedOn – The only way is the plugin route. Create a pre-update/pre-create plugin and fill in the propertybag with required valu and you will be good to go.

var target = this.PluginExecutionContext.InputParameters.ContainsKey("Target")
                               ? this.PluginExecutionContext.InputParameters["Target"] as Entity
                               : null;
if (PluginExecutionContext.MessageName.ToLower() == "create")// or update
{
      target.Attributes["modifiedon"] = DateTime.Now.AddYears(-4);
}