Adding Notes to a Workflow E-mail

Posted by Jim Steger on December 23, 2008  |  Comments (7)

In a recent post on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team blog, I discuss how you can easily overcome some of the native limitations of the CRM workflow Send E-mail action with some simple workflow assembly classes. Recently, I have been implementing the new eService Accelerator for our own corporate web site and came across a need for another CRM workflow e-mail utility...the ability to include all the notes of a record into the body of a workflow e-mail.

To accomplish this, I created a new activity class within my workflow utilities project and used the following code:

using System;
using System.Workflow.ComponentModel;
using System.Workflow.Activities;
using System.Web.Services.Protocols;
using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk;
using Microsoft.Crm.SdkTypeProxy;
using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Query;
using Microsoft.Crm.Workflow;
using System.Collections;
using System.Text;

namespace SonomaPartners.Crm.Workflow.Utilities
{
    [CrmWorkflowActivity("Format Notes", "Utilities")]
    public partial class FormatNotes : SequenceActivity
    {
        protected override ActivityExecutionStatus Execute(ActivityExecutionContext executionContext)
        {
            IContextService contextService = (IContextService)executionContext.GetService(typeof(IContextService));
            IWorkflowContext ctx = contextService.Context;
            ICrmService service = ctx.CreateCrmService();

            this.FormattedNotes = BuildNotesString(service, ctx.PrimaryEntityId);

            return base.Execute(executionContext);
        }

        public static DependencyProperty FormattedNotesProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("FormattedNotes", typeof(string), typeof(FormatNotes));
        [CrmOutput("Formatted Notes")]
        public string FormattedNotes
        {
            get { return (string)base.GetValue(FormattedNotesProperty); }
            set { base.SetValue(FormattedNotesProperty, value); }
        }


        private string BuildNotesString(ICrmService service, Guid id)
        {
            StringBuilder results = new StringBuilder();
            results.Append("Notes:<br>");

            BusinessEntityCollection notes = new BusinessEntityCollection();
            notes = RetrieveNotesForId(service, id);

            foreach (annotation note in notes.BusinessEntities)
            {
                results.Append(string.Format("{0}<br>", note.subject));
                results.Append(string.Format("{0}<br><br>", note.notetext));
            }

            return results.ToString();
        }

        private BusinessEntityCollection RetrieveNotesForId(ICrmService service, Guid id)
        {
            QueryByAttribute query = new QueryByAttribute();
            query.EntityName = "annotation";
            query.ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(new String[] { "subject", "notetext", "createdby", "createdon" });

            query.Attributes = new String[] { "objectid" };
            query.Values = new Object[] { id };
            query.Orders = new ArrayList();
            query.Orders.Add(new OrderExpression("createdon", OrderType.Descending));

            try
            {
                RetrieveMultipleRequest request = new RetrieveMultipleRequest();
                request.Query = query;

                RetrieveMultipleResponse returnedNotes = (RetrieveMultipleResponse)service.Execute(request);
                return returnedNotes.BusinessEntityCollection;
            }
            catch (SoapException ex)
            {
                throw new Exception(ex.Detail.InnerText);
            }
        }
    }
}

Now, your e-mail includes any notes in the body of the message as shown here:

Feel free to download the Visual Studio 2008 workflow utilities assembly solution file.

Btw, I also wanted to thank Steve Kaplan and Jim Glass for allowing me to contribute on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team blog.