This will be the first post in a series on how to update large groups of Dynamics CRM records using PowerShell. I use this whenever there's a request to update roughly 1000 or more records, otherwise I'd use the Bulk Edit or Export/Re-import from Excel, or maybe a workflow. Unfortunately CRM limits you to 250 records per page, so large updates have forced me to look to other methods.
Why PowerShell?
The reason I like to use PowerShell for this is because it's lightweight, comes installed on most Windows machines, and just feels easier to understand than C# to me (I'm not a developer). A lot of people might not realize you have the same access to all SDK assemblies through PowerShell. It just looks a little different in PowerShell, and once you get the hang of it, it becomes easy to bust out a script in no time.
Background Info and Disclaimer:
I don't claim to be an expert in PowerShell or anything else for that matter. In fact I've only been doing this for a year or so at the time of this post. I got started with this from this useful blog post and have expanded upon this on my own. Suggestions are welcome, just please be nice. :) For all of these I just use the basic Windows PowerShell ISE and am running PowerShell version 3.0. Our CRM version is 2013 Rollup 2 on premise.
Here We Go
As an introduction to this topic this example will show how to update the name of a single existing account record. In subsequent posts I hope to demonstrate how to update large lists of records from CSV, SQL queries, and CRM queries. Beyond that I hope to show how to update different data types, appends and more.
#Begin Script-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# SECTION 1: Add the CRM SDK Assemblies from the bin folder of the SDK
Add-Type -Path "***\Bin\Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.dll"
Add-Type -Path "***\Bin\Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll"
Add-Type -Path "***\Bin\Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Proxy.dll"
# SECTION 2: Create CRM connection and save in a variable
$url = "https://myCRM.domain.com"
$user = "DOMAIN\myUserID"
$pwd = Read-Host "Enter password for account $user"
$crmConnection = [Microsoft.Xrm.Client.CrmConnection]::Parse("Url=$url; Username=$user; Password=$pwd")
# SECTION 3: Save the Organization Service in an object
$service = New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.Xrm.Client.Services.OrganizationService -ArgumentList $crmConnection
# SECTION 4: Create account entity object to store the new data
$recordToUpdate = New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Entity -ArgumentList "account"
# SECTION 5: Assign the record GUID that you want to update as the Id property of the entity object. This is basically telling the API which record to update.
$recordToUpdate.Id = "[Put GUID here]"
# SECTION 6: List any fields as attributes of the entity variable and set their values
$recordToUpdate["name"] = "New Name Text"
# SECTION 7: Call the Update command using the Organization Service, and pass in the account entity object we configured above.
$service.Update($recordToUpdate);
#END Script--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If everything went correctly, running this script will update the "name" field with the new text. This example just updates the one text field. To update fields of different data types please refer to this post.
