CRM Workflow Manipulation Library

Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s workflow designer is built right into the web-application and provides a way to conditionally perform actions in CRM. With CRM on-premise, custom workflow assemblies can be uploaded to the server and accessed through the web-interface. The CRM Workflow Manipulation Library provides additional workflow actions to perform calculations and manipulate strings.

Two of its most notable capabilities are its ability to perform mathematical equations and phonetic codification solving for duplicate matching.

Sometimes you may want to calculate a percentage based on some of the fields on an opportunity, or you may want to perform a calculation to make a decision on who should work on a particular task. The solve equation workflow allows you to pass parameters and specify a formula for it to solve.

For example:

The benefit is that the solver can help you calculate values to include in an email or store data back to CRM. It does more than just basic math and can handle other constants and functions. One of the constants it can handle is rand, which generates a number from 0 to 1 similar to excel, and it handles randbetween to generate a number between two values.

The Manipulation Library contains two phonetic codification systems, SoundEx and a Metaphone-like system. Both of these can be used to convert text to a phonetic codified string that can then be compared for duplicate detection. There are complete instructions on how to configure workflow to perform SoundEx or Metaphone duplicate detection in the documentation.

The CRM Workflow Manipulation Library provides Calculation Utilities, RegEx Utilities, and String Utilities. It is a feature-rich workflow extension that provides the ability to do much more with the data already in your CRM system, and is definitely worth checking out on CodePlex. There are both Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 versions on CodePlex.