This project provieds a Fluent-style interface to Micorosft Dynamics CRM using the Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk web interface.

The primary focus of the project is to make it more efficient to write code that interacts with the Dynamics CRM system, making it easier to write code quickly that is right first time.

Another way of describing this project is to compare it to JQuery - JQuery makes working with the DOM on a web page much more productive, easier and less error prone. FluentCRM aims to do the same for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM API

This project arose from the frustrations of working with the existing SDK interface and dealing with various issues: -

1. Using late bound - Having to specificy in multiple places the name of the attribute to load from the server, and then the name to operate on This means we have the same information in multiple places, leading to mismatches and errors.

2. The issues around "phantom" updates to CRM attributes, where a poorly written client updates an attribute to the same value and writes it back to the server. This raises issues with clutter in the audit log, but more importantly can lead to workflows and plugins running even when there has been no actual change to an attribute.

3. Writing for the CRM SDK interface produces very "noisy" code. Another aim was to take advantage generics and a Fluent-style interface to produce code that is both easy to write and easy to read.

4. Try to avoid the "retreive of death" where a developer gives up trying to track which attributes they need and just pulls the whole entity back - just in case they have forgotten to include a field they might need.

5. Any interface had to be easily extended to cover the multiple different entity types found in a CRM installation.

6. Have you ever been asked to return a phone number from CRM, and the requirement says use the work number, or if that is missing use the mobile number. Oh and lets throw in the home number just in case the first two are missing? I had that problem, so FluentCRM can help there too.

A taste of Fluent: -

 FluentContact.Contact(contact.Id,  service)
               .UseAttribute( (string e) => myStruct.emailAddress = e, "emailaddress1")
               .Execute();

This fetches a contact by its ID, and if found it will call the closure to set myStruct.emailAddress to the value. Note that you have to only specify the attribute name once. Only this attribute will be retreived from CRM. Also observe that nothing happens before the final "Execute()". (much in the same way as LINQ does nothing till you try to use the results of the query)

 FluentContact.Contact(contact.Id,  service)
                .UseAttribute( (string e) => myStruct.emailAddress = e, "emailaddress1")
                .UseAttribute<string>( num =>  myStruct.phoneNumber =  num, "mobilephone", "telephone1" )
                .Execute();

This adds a clause to extract a phone number from either the "mobilephone" or "telephone1" fields (checking in the specified order for a field that is not empty and then calling the closure only once with the found value. If no value is found then the closure will not be called)

FluentContact.Contact(contact.Id,  service)
                .UseAttribute( (string e) => myStruct.emailAddress = e, "emailaddress1")
                .UseAttribute<string>( num =>  myStruct.phoneNumber =  num, "mobilephone", "telephone1" )
                .WeakExtractEntity(
                    con => myStruct.name = myStruct.contactName =
                        string.Join(" ", con.Attributes.firstname, con.Attributes.lastname),
                    "firstname", "lastname")
                .Execute();

Adds a WeakExtractEntity clause. This will call the closure with an "entity" fetched contaning the listed attributes.

FluentCRM targets .Net Framework 4.6.2 and Visual Studio 2017 - all of the dependencies will be pulled via nuget.

can be made to work with earlier VS versions probably wouldn't be a huge effort as there are only a couple of C# lanugage features in use. .Net framework 4.6.2 is only supported by CRM 9.0 (plugins, workflows etc) - but I've only recently made the change, so if you want to build for 4.5.2 for compatibility with earlier versions is should just be a matter of changing build settings and winding the Microsoft.Crmsdk nuget packages back to 9.0.2.5.