CRM2011 - SDK 5.0.3 - Linq to CRM Entities Problem

Question

I'm using crmsvcutil to generate early bound types. In the crm 4.0 days one was able to load related entites just by hitting the entity.ChildEntities property.

  //Winvs.Next.Entities.CrmDataContext dc = new Entities.CrmDataContext(new Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.OrganizationServiceContext(
  var cred = new System.ServiceModel.Description.ClientCredentials();
  cred.Windows.ClientCredential = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
  //      
  using (var organizationServiceProxy = new Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.OrganizationServiceProxy(new Uri(System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["CrmConnection"].ConnectionString), null, cred, null))
  using (Winvs.Next.Entities.CrmDataContext dc = new Entities.CrmDataContext(organizationServiceProxy))
  {
    // This statement is required to enable early-bound type support.
    organizationServiceProxy.ServiceConfiguration.CurrentServiceEndpoint.Behaviors.Add(new Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client.ProxyTypesBehavior());
    //
    foreach (var a in dc.AccountSet)
    {
      foreach (var c in a.contact_customer_accounts)
      {
        c.FullName.ToString();
      }
    }       
  }

When I do this with the latest CRM 2011 SDK version instead of loading realted entities I'm getting a NullReferenceException which gives me no further information about the issue.

foreach (var c in a.contact_customer_accounts)

What Do i miss? How can I load related entities with CRM2011 Linq?

Answer 1

I was having exactly the same issue as you. I saw those properties and was perplexed as to why they always returned null. They clearly were intended to retrieve entities for a particular relationship, yet they seemed to be "dormant."

It occurred to me that maybe the context object was not configured properly to lazy-load these "navigation" properties (to borrow a term from Entity Framework). So I started researching what I could about OrganizationServiceContext, and found this bit about its LoadProperty method:

If the property represents an association, link or deferred property, calling this method provides the client a way to lazily load related resources.

That sounded like what I needed, and one of the overloads takes an Entity and a Relationship as input. So, once you have an instance of an entity with one or more relationships, you need to ask the context to load the corresponding properties. Keep in mind, the entity must be attached to the context, either automatically (because you retrieved the entity via a context query), or manually using the Attach method.

I'm a little confused by your code because you're using a CrmDataContext object rather than an OrganizationServiceContext object. The code samples in the 2011 SDK use the latter, and the crmsvcutil will even generate a custom instance of OrganizationServiceContext with methods in the form of "[ENTITY_NAME]Set" (i.e. AccountSet as in your example). You may need to switch over to the newer context type.

So, using your example and assuming dc is now an instance of OrganizationServiceContext, it would look like:

Relationship contactRel = new Relationship("contact_customer_accounts");
foreach (var a in dc.AccountSet) {

    dc.LoadProperty(a, contactRel); // Tell context to load entities from this relationship

    foreach (var c in a.contact_customer_accounts) {
        c.FullName.ToString();
    }

}

It is a pain to have to manually load each relationship, but I can find no other way of activating those properties.

---

Note: To get crmsvcutil to generate a custom OrganizationServiceContext, specify the serviceContextName switch:

crmsvcutil.exe /url:<your_crm_url> /out:Xrm.cs /serviceContextName:XrmServiceContext

This would create a derived class named XrmServiceContext with accessors for all of the different entity types in your organization.