No Code solution to populate Two Options values when creating a record from a CRM 2011 dialog

The inspiration for this post is a similarly titled blog on msdn from @devkeydet.

Is is an excellent read, and shows the power and ease of using custom workflows. I am going to provide a solution for the same scenario which uses the existing process (workflow) UI, but without any custom coding.

The business case is pretty straightforward. Here is the scenario from the blog post in its entirety:

“I have an entity with a field of type ‘Two Options’ that I would like to populate within a ‘Create Record’ activity in a CRM 2011 dialog.   The ‘Two Options’ type in CRM 2011 is a boolean.  The ‘Prompt and Response’ activity in a CRM 2011 dialog only gives me options for Text/Integer/Float. Because of this, I can’t set the value of the answer to the field in the entity  within ‘Set Properties’ because the types don’t match.”

Here are the steps to achieve the same result without the custom code workflow:

CRM 2011 Dialogs with Dynamic FetchXML - Duplicate Case Detection

Dialogs are a great new addition to the CRM feature suite. They provide an efficient way to capture business process information through a logical step by step workflow. Think of a Customer Service Representative entering a case, or Marketing folks qualifying a lead. There are still ways to go with regard to using dialogs as a full fledged call center scripter, but it is definitely the right step forward for Microsoft.

In dialogs, the user responses are captured and steps can have branching based on previous responses. There is also the capability of generating dynamic questions, which we shall see in more detail in a bit. Dialogs are a bit similar to workflows in that you can do create/update actions on entities/ records. In a sense, we can think of dialogs as a workflow with user input. Dialogs can be run only on one record, and unfortunately, the response does not have a muti select option (ie, you cannot choose more than one answer as a response).

The business case is as follows. I want to be able to detect any duplicate cases (based on title and customer) related on the current case. If I do find similar ones, I want to be able to create a connection between the 2 cases using a custom connection role, mark the case found as cancelled/ duplicate and add a note to the duplicate case mentioning the reason. Remember that both the customer and title needs to be match for this duplicate detection to work.