Adding Dynamics CRM 2011 Records from a Windows Workflow Service

I’ve written a couple blog posts (and even a book chapter!) on how to integrate BizTalk Server with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and I figured that I should take some of my own advice and diversify my experiences.  So, I thought that I’d demonstrate how to consume Dynamics CRM 2011 web services from a .NET 4.0 Workflow Service.

First off, why would I do this?  Many reasons.  One really good one is the durability that WF Services + Server AppFabric offers you.  We can create a Workflow Service that fronts the Dynamics CRM 2011 services and let upstream callers asynchronously invoke our Workflow Service without waiting for a response or requiring Dynamics CRM to be online. Or, you could use Workflow Services to put a friendly proxy API in front of the notoriously unfriendly CRM SOAP API.

Let’s dig in.  I created a new Workflow Services project in Visual Studio 2010 and immediately added a service reference.

After adding the reference, I rebuilt the Visual Studio project and magically got Workflow Activities that match all the operations exposed by the Dynamics CRM service.

A promising start.  Next I defined a C# class to represent a canonical “Customer” object.  I sketched out a simple Workflow Service that takes in a Customer object and returns a string value indicating that the Customer was received by the service.

I then added two more variables that are needed for calling the “Create” operation in the Dynamics CRM service. First, I created a variable for the “entity” object that was added to the project from my service reference, and then I added another variable for the GUID response that is returned after creating an entity.

Now I need to instantiate the “CrmEntity” variable.  Here’s where I can use the BizTalk Mapper shape that comes with the LOB adapter installation and BizTalk Server 2010. I dragged the Mapper shape from the Widows Workflow toolbox and get asked for the source and destination data types.

I then created a new Map.

I then built a map using the strategy I employed in previous posts.  Specifically, I copied each source node to a Looping functoid, and then connected each source to Scripting functoid with an XSLT Call Template inside that contained the script to create the key/value pair structure in the destination.

After saving and building the Workflow Service, I invoked the service via the WCF Test Client. I sent in some data and hoped to see a matching record in Dynamics CRM.

If I go to my Dynamics CRM 2011 instance, I can find a record for my dog, Watson.

So, that was pretty simple.  You can use the ease of creation and deployment of Workflow Services while combining the power of the BizTalk Mapper.