Dynamics 365 New Features - Alternate Keys

I will confess that these are new features for me, so if you happen to have left the Dynamics CRM world at the same time as me and are coming back to it now this post will be super useful otherwise, well not so much maybe

Alternate Keys

With alternate keys, you can assure an efficient and accurate way of integrating data into Microsoft Dynamics 365 from external systems. It’s especially important in cases when an external system doesn’t store the Dynamics 365 record IDs (GUIDs) that uniquely identify records. The alternate keys are not GUIDs and you can use them to uniquely identify the Dynamics 365 records. You must give an alternate key a unique name. You can use one or more entity fields to define the key. For example, to identify an account record with an alternate key, you can use the account name and the account number. You can define alternate keys in the Dynamics 365 web application without writing code, or you can define them programmatically. Note that while you can define the alternate keys in the user interface (UI), they can only be used programmatically, in code.

An entity can have up to 5 alternate keys and for each one a new index will be created, this is done a as background job, so there will be an associated decrease in insert performance, whether this will be noticeable it's hard to say.



This allows us to write code like this, see below, to change the account name, the assumption here is that this account, 1234, is coming from another system and in this system it's using integer keys.

For the record, alternate keys allow the following types

Decimal Number
Whole Number
Single Line of Text

Code:

using (CrmServiceClient client = new CrmServiceClient(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["Inc"].ConnectionString))
            {
                try
                {
                    Entity account = new Entity("account", "accountnumber", 1234);
                    account["name"] = "Changing Name";
                    client.Update(account);
                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(ex);
                }
            }