In the CRM SDK, when you retrieve the value of an Option Set attribute for an entity, only the integer value is returned. This is true for both early and late binding.

To retrieve the formatted value, i.e. the corresponding string label for the integer value, you would need to use the FormattedValues collection of the entity. For example, if we wanted to get the Preferred Contact Method for an account, this would look like this:

string preferredContactMethodLabel = entity.FormattedValues["preferredcontactmethodcode"];

This approach works for both early and late binding. However, you need to use the attribute’s logical name as a string, which defeats the purpose of early binding.

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Update 17/09/2014: Be aware that in some cases the FormattedValues collection is not populated for the entity, for example for the Target entity of an Update plugin. This is true even if the Option Set field is one of the fields being updated. I have tested this with SP1 installed. The code below has been updated to handle this by returning an empty string. Under these scenarios, you’d need to retrieve the metadata of the field to retrieve the corresponding label.

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To overcome this, I have developed an extension method on the Entity class that allows you to retrieve the formatted value of an Option Set attribute using a lambda. You’d use it like this:

string preferredContactMethodLabel = entity.GetFormattedValue(() => entity.PreferredContactMethodCode);

Just like early binding, the benefit of using a lambda is compiler checking. The lambda is also strongly typed to OptionSetValue, which means doing something like entity.GetOptionSetFormattedValue(() => entity.Name) would result in a compiler error.

public static class EntityExtension
	{
		public static string GetFormattedValue(this Entity entity, Expression<Func<OptionSetValue>> optionSetValueExpression)
		{
			Func<OptionSetValue> optionSetValueFunc = optionSetValueExpression.Compile();
			OptionSetValue optionSetValue = optionSetValueFunc();

			if (optionSetValue != null)
			{
				var optionSetAttributeName = entity.GetOptionSetAttributeName(optionSetValueExpression);
				return entity.FormattedValues.ContainsKey(optionSetAttributeName) ?
					entity.FormattedValues[optionSetAttributeName] : String.Empty;
			}
			return null;
		}

		public static string GetOptionSetAttributeName(this Entity entity, Expression<Func<OptionSetValue>> optionSetValueExpression)
		{
			string expressionString = optionSetValueExpression.ToString();
			int lastDotIndex = expressionString.LastIndexOf('.');

			string attributeName = lastDotIndex == -1 ? expressionString : expressionString.Substring(lastDotIndex + 1);
			return attributeName.ToLower();
		}
	}

This approach works base on the convention that the property names of the generated early binding types are the schema names of the entity attributes. Using Expression<Func> allows us to pass and perform string manipulation/interrogation on a lambda that is typed to OptionSetValue.

If the expression () => entity.PreferredContactMethodCode was passed, then optionSetValueExpression.ToString() would give the string below (Harness.Program is my test harness class), which allows us to extract the name of the attribute.

() => value(Harness.Program+<>c__DisplayClass0).entity.PreferredContactMethodCode

So there you have it, with a few simple extension methods you can improve your code quality, reduce chance of error, and keep your early-binding zen ;).

Retrieving related records in CRM may not be straightforward for someone starting out in CRM development. I previously wrote about how you can do this using QueryExpression and LinkEntity. However, I recently learnt of another, and probably better, approach using RetrieveRequest. This post explains this approach.

Scenario

I have two entities: Course (logical name ng_course) and Subject (logical name ng_subject). These entities are in an N:N relationship (relationship name ng_course_subject). I need to retrieve all the related Subjects for a given Course.

Approach explained

You might be tempted to first retrieve the Course entity by its ID (using the IOrganizationService.Retrieve() method) and then access the RelatedEntities property of the returned object. This however will not work, as the RelatedEntities property will be empty for entities retrieved using this way.

The RelatedEntities property will be populated as expected if we use the IOrganizationService.Execute() method and passing in a correctly setup RetrieveRequest object. The code below demonstrates how this can be done. Review the comments.

//Credentials for invoking the service
var credentials = new ClientCredentials();
credentials.UserName.UserName = "mydomain\\user1";
credentials.UserName.Password = "password1";

var organisationUrl = new Uri("http://nguyen5:5555/NguyenOrg/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc");
var service = new OrganizationServiceProxy(organisationUrl, null, credentials, null);

//This is the ID of the Course, i.e. the parent record of the related Subject records that we need to retrieve.
var courseID = "7CF5E251-30C1-E311-84ED-00155DAB7703";

//Creating a new request
var retrieveRequest = new RetrieveRequest();

//The way RetrieveRequest works is that we tell it to retrieve
//a particular record, and also retrieve the related records for that
//record at the same time. Therefore, the Target property of the request 
//will be set to the parent record. We will subsequently specify the
//relationship for the request so that the right related
//records will also be retrieved.
retrieveRequest.Target = new EntityReference("ng_course", new Guid(courseID));

//The columns to retrieve for the parent record
retrieveRequest.ColumnSet = new ColumnSet("ng_maximumcreditpoints", "ng_name");

//This is where we specify the relationship for the request to retrieve
//the related records. Note that you can retrieve multiple types of related
//records by adding multiple relationships here.
retrieveRequest.RelatedEntitiesQuery = new RelationshipQueryCollection();

//The name of the relationship
retrieveRequest.RelatedEntitiesQuery.Add(new Relationship("ng_course_subject"),
				
	//Name of the related entities
	new QueryExpression("ng_subject")
	{
		//The columns to retrieve for the related records
		ColumnSet = new ColumnSet("ng_creditpoints", "ng_name")

		//Note that you can further filter the related records to be returned by
		//specifying the Criteria property for the QueryExpression.
	});
			
//Execute the request and process the response
var response = (RetrieveResponse)service.Execute(retrieveRequest);

Console.WriteLine("Course name: {0}, Max credit points: {1}", response.Entity["ng_name"], response.Entity["ng_maximumcreditpoints"]);
			
//The RelatedEntities property is now populated with the related records
foreach (var relatedSubject in response.Entity.RelatedEntities[new Relationship("ng_course_subject")].Entities)
{
	Console.WriteLine("Subject name: {0}, Credit points: {1}", relatedSubject["ng_name"], relatedSubject["ng_creditpoints"]);
}