Question

I’m trying to work out how to use the CrmService to close a Task in MS CRM 4.0

I’ve tried to use the SetStateTaskRequest to set a Task’s state and status to TaskState.Completed and 5. I also tried TaskState.Completed and -1, but no dice there either.

Either way, I only receive the ever-helpful "Server was unable to process request" exception on the CrmService.Execute attempt.

I can create and update Tasks as freely as I please. But I can’t seem to set them to completed. It’s frustrating.

I noticed that I can only set the state of a Task to Completed in CRM through the Close Task action. I was wondering if there is a separate CrmService call that I need to make to perform the Close Task action, rather than going through the CrmService.Execute method.

Oh: I’m logging into the CrmService with full permissions. So I can’t see that it would be a permissions issue on the task item.

I can’t think what else could be causing this issue. Any advice or even just a point in the right direction would be very much appreciated.

FIRST EDIT:

Thanks to grega g‘s answer for getting me to check the Detail field of the exception.

I now have a more detailed exception message. In XML Form:

<error>
    <code>0x80040203</code>
    <description>Invalid format of input XML for request SetStateTask: required field 'EntityId' is missing.</description>
    <type>Platform</type>
</error>

Which is bizarre – consider my code (almost identical to greg g’s:

SetStateTaskRequest request = new SetStateTaskRequest();
request.EntityID = gTaskId;
request.TaskState = TaskState.Completed;

// ETaskStatusCode is an enumeration of the status codes taken from the StringMap in CRM.
//
// ETaskStatusCode.Completed = 5 - I can confirm this is the accurate status value for a Closed Task.
//
// Also, I have attempted this code with -1, which the documentation claims should cause the status
// to automatically be set to the default status for the supplied state. No change there.
request.TaskStatus = (int)ETaskStatusCode.Completed;            

SetStateTaskResponse response = CRMManager.CrmService.Execute(request) as SetStateTaskResponse;

Also, just to confirm that I have the right status code (and also share something I’ve found very useful when dealing with MS CRM), here’s the SQL I use to determine the values for entity statuses.

SELECT
    MSE.ObjectTypeCode,
    MSE.PhysicalName,
    SM.AttributeName,
    SM.Value,
    SM.AttributeValue
FROM MetadataSchema.Entity MSE
    INNER JOIN StringMap SM on MSE.ObjectTypeCode = SM.ObjectTypeCode
ORDER BY MSE.PhysicalName, SM.AttributeName, SM.AttributeValue  

I can confirm from the MS CRM web interface that the Status value that is associated with a Completed task is also named Completed. I can confirm from the SQL above that the value of this status, for a Task, is 5 – this is the value passed in from my Enum.

I can also confirm that gTaskId is being set to a valid Guid that references a Task that actually does exist, and is open at the time the close is attempted.

Curiouser and curiouser. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Found it!

Okay – reviewing my code above and the error message closely, my CrmService contained the property EntityID – but the exception was that the property EntityId was missing.

Somehow, my CrmService had its EntityId property renamed to EntityID.

Renaming the property fixed the problem. I still have no idea how that happened in the first place.

To be safe, I’ll regenerate a new Service proxy to make sure that my properties are correctly named.

Looking through the code, it seems that someone did a find-and-replace on ‘Id’ and turned it into ‘ID’ – which incidentally is the naming convention in my workplace for Property fields that represent primary keys.

Thanks again to grega g for pointing out that the Detail property had the extra information I needed.