Delete CRM Records Using PowerShell

There are times when I receive a request to delete a large list of specific records from CRM.  There's always the Bulk Delete option that CRM provides out of the box, but that relies on the Advanced Find to generate your list.  And as good as the Advanced Find is, it also has its limitations when compared to regular SQL.  So when the list of records cannot be generated through the Advanced Find I turn to a PowerShell call to the API instead.

In this example I have the list of CRM records in a CSV file that gets imported as an array of objects.  The only requirement here is to have the record ID (GUID) of the record you want to delete.  Deleting records is a little easier because you don't need to create an entity object.  You just provide the record id and entity logical name ('salesorder' in this example), and call the Delete command.

As always, this script follows the same template I showed in my first post.  Please refer to that for more details.


#Add SDK references
Add-Type -Path "MySDKPath\Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.dll";
Add-Type -Path "MySDKPath\Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll";
Add-Type -Path "MySDKPath\Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Proxy.dll";

# Configure CRM connection
$CRMUrl = "http://MyCRMURL";
$CRMLogin = "MyDomain\MyUserID";
$CRMPwd = Read-Host "Enter password for account $CRMLogin"
$CRMConnection = [Microsoft.Xrm.Client.CrmConnection]::Parse("Url=$CRMUrl; Username=$CRMLogin; Password=$CRMPwd");
$CRMService = New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.Xrm.Client.Services.OrganizationService -ArgumentList $CRMConnection;

#Import List of Records to Process
$sourceRecords = Import-Csv "C:\MyListOfRecords.csv"

#Optional Counter to show progress
$count = 0

#Process each record in the csv file.  
foreach($record in $sourceRecords){
    $count ++;
    Write-Host "Deleting record $count of"$sourceRecords.Count".  Record ID = "$record.salesorderid
    $CRMService.Delete("salesorder", $record.salesorderid.Guid);
    }
}