Every Microsoft Dynamics CRM developer runs into a situation when JavaScript + SOAP call is the only logical way out. Now with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 things have changed and old solutions which worked really well with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 don’t work anymore. The only way you can achieve this is to use the solution provided in SDK to dump raw SOAP packet and then using Jamie’s Soap formatter tool (http://crm2011soap.codeplex.com) you can get a JavaScript that can be used against CRM 2011. Now this is a lengthy process so it is time consuming and as it involves multiple manual steps that make it more error-prone. I am always bit lazy when it comes to monotonous tasks which don’t add value to my current engagement. That makes me a big fan of automation, and by automation I mean reduce my efforts to minimal manual inputs to get things done.
On the great journey of automation, inspired by many others, here I would like to present one of the first utility from CrmXpress – SmartSoapLogger v1.0. It is a very simple tool that integrates all of the above mentioned manual tasks in one click and helps you generate required code to make JavaScript + SOAP calls. This tool is available on CodePlex at: http://smartsoaplogger.codeplex.com.
It works with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 On-Premise as well as Online (With some creative thinking this utility can work with CRM 4.0 as well just you will have to put some efforts in order to introduce CRM 4.0 support). Thanks to Jamie Miley (http://mileyja.blogspot.com) the source code for this tool is available on CodePlex at: http://smartsoaplogger.codeplex.com/releases/76542/download/301730.
Also I would like to thank Jamie Miley for his efforts on building SOAP formatter (http://mileyja.blogspot.com/2011/03/crm-2011-jscript-soap-request-formatter.html) as I could build this tool very quickly using his codebase.
Here is a small video demo where SSL (I know SmartSoapLogger is a long name) connects with CRM Online and generates script and SOAP packets for a WhoAmI call.