Performing CRUD Operations synchronously in CRM 2011 through JSON

Synchronous methods to create, update and delete the records for the Account entity through JSON. These methods works synchronously.

Create Records: To create the record into the CRM, you need to create an object for that record. After that you need to create the object of the XMLHttpRequest and open this request through “POST” method and need to call the send method with this jsonEntity (create from the target record).

function createRecord( ) {
var account = new Object( );
account.Name = "Create Sample";
account.Telephone1 = "555-0123";
account.AccountNumber = "ABCDEFGHIJ";
account.EMailAddress1 = "someone1@example.com";

var jsonEntity = window.JSON.stringify(account);
var createRecordReq = new XMLHttpRequest( );
var ODataPath = Xrm.Page.context.getServerUrl( ) + "/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc";
createRecordReq.open('POST', ODataPath + "/" + "AccountSet", false);
createRecordReq.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
createRecordReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8");
createRecordReq.send(jsonEntity);

var newRecord = JSON.parse(createRecordReq.responseText).d;
//Alert the Id of the created record
alert("Id is: " + newRecord.AccountId);
}

Update Record: Update record request is same as the create but for the Update we need to set the Additional request header for the Method in the XMLHttpRequest. Here we have added the “MERGE” method. As shown below.
updateRecordReq.setRequestHeader("X-HTTP-Method", "MERGE");

And when we open the request, we need to pass the guid of the record. As given in the below script.

function updateRecord( ) {
var account = Object( );
account.Name = "Update Name of this Account";
var jsonEntity = window.JSON.stringify(account);
var updateRecordReq = new XMLHttpRequest( );
var ODataPath = Xrm.Page.context.getServerUrl( ) + "/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc";
updateRecordReq.open('POST', ODataPath + "/" + "AccountSet" + "(guid'" + "E72B45B9-58E0-E011-B700-00155D005515" + "')", false);
updateRecordReq.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
updateRecordReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8");
updateRecordReq.setRequestHeader("X-HTTP-Method", "MERGE");
updateRecordReq.send(jsonEntity);

}

Delete Record: This is same as update request but here we need to call the Method delete and call send method with the null parameter.

function deleteRecord( ) {
var deleteRecordReq = new XMLHttpRequest( );
var ODataPath = Xrm.Page.context.getServerUrl( ) + "/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc";
deleteRecordReq.open('POST', ODataPath + "/" + "AccountSet" + "(guid'" + "E72B45B9-58E0-E011-B700-00155D005515" + "')", false);

deleteRecordReq.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
deleteRecordReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8");
deleteRecordReq.setRequestHeader("X-HTTP-Method", "DELETE");
deleteRecordReq.send(null);

}


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Read records synchronously using JSON in CRM 2011

Common knowledge is that we can make JSON requests through scripts in CRM 2011 to retrieve data from CRM entities. However, the JSON request works asynchronously i.e it does not return the results immediately and the control moves to the next line of code to be executed.

It so happened during one of our development sessions is that we had to write a script to populate the values of some attributes on a form based on the value entered in another form, similar to the usual copy the phone and email once the contact is selected. We had written the JSON code for this but because it executed asynchronously the control would return to the user even before the code execution completed and the phone and email was populated on the form. The user would click on Save and Close and reported an issue that it did not bring over the phone and email…

We can replace JSON with SOAP and get this done. But we thought of getting this done by executing JSON request synchronously now that we already has the code in there to execute the call through JSON.
function retrieveRecordsSynchronously() {

var retrieveRecordsReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
var ODataPath = Xrm.Page.context.getServerUrl() + "/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/AccountSet";
retrieveRecordsReq.open('GET', ODataPath, false);
retrieveRecordsReq.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
retrieveRecordsReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8");
retrieveRecordsReq.send(null);
var records = JSON.parse(retrieveRecordsReq.responseText).d;
//Read the first account name
alert('First Account Name is: ' + records.results[0].Name);
}
As given in the above code we need to create the object of the XMLHttpRequest and need to open this request through ‘GET’ method. And after setting the header of this request we need to just call the send Method to send the request, after that we need to parse the response text of the request and from that we can read the results.

We are reading from AccountSet and it returns an array of accounts. Note it would only return 50 results at a time.