How To Communicating from BizTalk Server to Dynamics CRM

The way that you send requests from BizTalk Server to Dynamics CRM 2011 has changed significantly in this release. In the previous versions of Dynamics CRM, a BizTalk "send" adapter was available for communicating with the platform. Dynamics CRM 2011 no longer ships with an adapter and developers are encouraged to use the WCF endpoints exposed by the product.
Dynamics CRM has both a WCF REST and SOAP endpoint. The REST endpoint can only be used within the CRM application itself. For instance, you can build what is called a web resource that is embedded in a Dynamics CRM page. This resource could be a Microsoft Silverlight or HTML page that looks up data from three different Dynamics CRM entities and aggregates them on the page. This web resource can communicate with the Dynamics CRM REST API, which is friendly to JavaScript clients. Unfortunately, you cannot use the REST endpoint from outside of the Dynamics CRM environment, but because BizTalk cannot communicate with REST services, this has little impact on the BizTalk integration story.
The Dynamics CRM SOAP API, unlike its ASMX web service predecessor, is static and operates with a generic Entity data structure. Instead of having a dynamic WSDL that exposes typed definitions for all of the standard and custom entities in the system, the Dynamics CRM 2011 SOAP API has a set of operations (for example, Create, Retrieve) that function with a single object type. The Entity object has a property identifying which concrete object it represents (for example, Account or Contract), and a name/value pair collection that represents the columns and values in the object it represents. For instance, an Entity may have a LogicalName set to "Account" and columns for "telephone1", "emailaddress", and "websiteurl."
In essence, this means that we have two choices when interacting with Dynamics CRM 2011 from BizTalk Server. Our first option is to directly consume and invoke the untyped SOAP API. Doing this involves creating maps from a canonical schema to the type-less Entity schema. In the case of doing a Retrieve operation, we may also have to map the type-less Entity message back to a structured message for more processing. Below, we will walk through an example of this.
Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration
The second option involves creating a typed proxy service for BizTalk Server to invoke. Dynamics CRM has a feature-rich Solution Development Kit (SDK) that allows us to create typed objects and send them to the Dynamics CRM SOAP endpoint. This proxy service will then expose a typed interface to BizTalk that operates as desired with a strongly typed schema. An upcoming exercise demonstrates this scenario.
Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration
Which choice is best? For simple solutions, it may be fine to interact directly with the Dynamics CRM 2011 SOAP API. If you are updating a couple fields on an entity, or retrieving a pair of data values, the messiness of the untyped schema is worth the straightforward solution. However, if you are making large scale changes to entities, or getting back an entire entity and publishing to the BizTalk bus for more subscribers to receive, then working strictly with a typed proxy service is the best route. However, we will look at both scenarios below, and you can make that choice for yourself.

Integrating Directly with the Dynamics CRM 2011 SOAP API

In the following series of steps, we will look at how to consume the native Dynamics CRM SOAP interface in BizTalk Server. We will first look at how to query Dynamics CRM to return an Entity. After that, we will see the steps for creating a new Entity in Dynamics CRM.

Querying Dynamics CRM from BizTalk Server

In this scenario, BizTalk Server will request details about a specific Dynamics CRM "contact" record and send the result of that inquiry to another system.




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Hi,

If any one want to give the stagnation and change its most welcome.

Thanks!!
Rajesh Singh.

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