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Sunday, October 26, 2008

Dynamic CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager validation error - Line breaks

My company are in the process of migrating from Outlook Business Contacts Manager to Microsoft Dynamic CRM 4.0.

I've hit and overcame a few brick walls during this process, which is still ongoing. I've decided to document my findings in case anyone else comes up against the same problems.

The first problem I came up against and probably the most common is line breaks in your field data causes the validation process of the data migration manager to fail. It seems to see a line break as the start of a new field even when your data is surrounded by double quotes.

To be more specific it's a carriage return (Cr) followed by a line feed (Lf) that causes the problems. The only solution that I know of is to replace the CrLf pairs with just a Lf.

This can be easily done in Excel with a macro that you run over your worksheet.

Sub repLF()
Cells.Replace What:=vbCrLf, Replacement:=vbLf, LookAt:=xlPart, _SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, MatchCase:=False, SearchFormat:=False, _ReplaceFormat:=False
End Sub

For me that seems to get rid of most validation errors. I've looked at the imported data in the CRM and it seems to be OK i.e. line break still appear properly.

Hope that helps seem people who are facing the same problem.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for posting this info.

I followed the outline of what you have written above to remove the (Cr)'s from my data but still wasn't able to load the data into CRM using the DMM. Did you do anything else to get the DMM to allow your line feeds?

BTW there's a small typo in your code: bvLf --> vbLf

Cheers,

Stu

Jamie said...

Hi Stu,

Sorry for the late reply.

I never had to do anything extra, but I have read of people removing double quotes and comma's from there data.

At what point is it failing? During the validate of the data or does it not look right in the CRM?

Cheers

jackbroobgm said...

Verification and Validation are the activities performed to improve the quality and reliability of the system and assure the product satisfies the customer needs.
Verification assures the product of each development phase meets their respective requirements.
Validation assures the final product meets the client requirements.

software validation

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