Unitek Microsoft CRM Blog

Feb 18 2008

The Short & Skinny On Deleting Upgraded Entities In Microsoft CRM 4.0

Published by Unitek CRM Team at 5:37 pm under Microsoft CRM 4.0, Microsoft CRM Customization

If you are planning an upgrade and have considered the enhanced functionality with the new N:1, 1:N and N:N (Many to Many) relationships, you may be re-working some of your entities in the new Microsoft CRM 4.0 deployment, or you may just be cleaning up unused custom entities from your initial Microsoft CRM 3.0 deployment. We were excited at the flexibility in Microsoft CRM 3.0 with the many to one relationship creation and the platform’s protection and involvement in that process, but in many cases the creation of custom entities was over-used in Microsoft CRM 3.0 so we have some clean-up to perform.

If you plan on re-working some of your entities to take advantage of the new Many to Many capabilities, you may be removing some of your entities and consolidating them in Microsoft CRM 4.0, so it may save you some time to move the data from the re-purposed entities and delete them in Microsoft CRM 3.0 before you upgrade because when you go through the upgrade process you’ll have to consider removing references to your related entity from all your column views in the primary entities as well as the filter criteria.

The following screenshots illustrate the steps taken when deleting the re-purposed related entity in MSCRM 4.0:

The previously created custom entity ‘Vendor Product/Int. Area’ will be removed.

When we go to the form for the entity:

We see we have relationship attributes published on the entity form, so we remove them and publish the form without the relationship attribute on it.

Next we take a look at the relationships our entity in with other entities:

But without considering that references to our entity from related entity colums, filter criteria and published forms, we may not get very far:

(Reference to our Entity in related entity lookup filter criteria for views; uncheck and publish):

Then you can delete your entity:

Keep in mind that you are free to delete your entity if it is in a relationship as a related entity with another entity even though the relationship attribute is published on the form, as long as you are deleting the related entity that contains the published relationship attribute, and there are no references to your related entity on the primary entity in the form of filter criteria, column references etc.