A common request amongst our Dynamics CRM Portals customers is the ability to execute custom actions and serverside logic in CRM. There are several ways of communicating with the Dynamics 365 platform:

  • entity lists
  • entity forms
  • liquid fetch queries
  • web forms
  • …

But it’s still not possible to directly call a custom action from within CRM Portals. Or at least… it wasn’t. We came up with a solution that allows us to call Custom Actions through Liquid.

Calling Custom Actions

When communication with Dynamics 365 through Liquid, we’re limited to retrieval only. This is because Liquid only supports Fetch XML. However, we can work around this by creating a new entity, writing a Fetch XML  towards that new entity and creating a plugin on the RetrieveMultiple Message of that plugin. While I’m usually very weary of plugins on Retrieve / RetrieveMultiple, in this case it’s absolutely justifiable by the fact that we create a new entity that will solely be used for this purpose.

  1. Create a new entity called ADX Action.
  2. Register a plugin on RetrieveMultiple of this entity.
  3. Write a Liquid Fetch XML for this entity.

1. Creating the new entity

There’s a couple of things we want to achieve in calling Custom Actions through CRM Portals. We want to send information to CRM, let CRM work with that information and provide us a response, based on the actions it executed. Therefore, there are two important fields that we need to provide in this entity:

  • Parameters. Type: text. Allows us to pass information to Dynamics 365.
  • Response. Type: text. Allows us to send information from Dynamics 365 back to the CRM Portal.

Our entity looks like this:

The new Portals Action entity

2. Register a plugin on RetrieveMultiple of this entity

This is the engine of our CRM Portals Custom Action solution. Within the plugin we do a couple of things:

  • Extract the parameters from the incoming query’s filter criteria.
  • Decide what to do and exute that logic based on the query’s filter criteria.
  • Assign a response value by setting a result in the EntityCollection.

The tricky part here is to parse the filter criteria of the incoming query. We are doing this in the plugin as you can see in the screenshot below.

Plugin on Post Retrieve Multiple on Portal Actions

Plugin on Post Retrieve Multiple on Portal Actions - GetQueryExpression

In the “DoStuff” method you can apply your own logic like triggering Custom Actions, workflows, etc. Afterwards we send a result back to the Portals. We do this by adding a dummy entity to the EntityCollection that is returned in the RetrieveMultiple message. In doing so, the Fetch XML always results in one single result, containing our response message.

3. Write a Liquid Fetch XML for this entity

This is how our Fetch looks like in Liquid. Of course you can modify this to pass along you own parameters like userid,etc …

Calling our custom plugin from Liquid

notice that we add an additional filter on the date of creation. In this filter we pass the current timestamp. Although this will not impact our results, it ensures that our request will not be cached. We’ve noticed that CRM Portals tend to cache  the results of previously executed Liquid queries, which could result in your action not being triggered.

And the response we’re getting (printscreen taken from the XML FetchBuilder):

Portal Liquid Fetch Response

Ultimately that’s all there is to it. With these three simpel components, we’ve made it possible to trigger custom actions from within CRM Portals.