How to update a deployed plugin in Dynamics CRM Online - dynamics-crm-2011

Question

I'm new to programming in Dynamics CRM Online and I'm having a problem updating a deployed plugin. I'm using Visual Studio 2012 as my IDE. I deployed a plugin that I need to modify and when I re-deploy it thru VS the modified date in CRM is correct but the changes are not there. Here is my code..
if (context.InputParameters.Contains("Target")
&& context.InputParameters["Target"] is Entity)
{
Entity entity = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];
if (entity.LogicalName == "lead")
{
if (entity.Attributes.Contains("companyname") == true)
{
if (entity["firstname"].ToString() != "null")
firstName = entity["firstname"].ToString();
else
firstName = "";
if (entity["lastname"].ToString() != "null")
lastName = entity["lastName"].ToString();
else
lastName = "";
entity["companyName"] = "This is a test";
//entity["companyname"] = firstName + " " + lastName;
}
else
throw new InvalidPluginExecutionException(
"The company name can only be set by the system.");
}
}
When I create a lead the company name is not "This is a test". I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.
Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You detect whether the field with company name exists by:
if (entity.Attributes.Contains("companyname") == true)
but you write to an other, namely:
entity["companyName"] = "This is a test";
The value is put in the entity but since it has no counterpart in the metadata, it's not being stored. Set the field name to it's to schema name, i.e. lower cased.
A few other things to consider in case you get additional errors.
You need to call Update method on the service after you've set the field's value.
The field should have some kind of prefix (e.g. new_something, beep_something).
The camel casing is not applicable here (schema name is), so go alltolowercase.
What do you get as the company name? Do you get the exception being thrown?
Also, some pointers on the code quality. I've rebuilt the logic to eliminate unnecessary complexity of scopes. I removed the superfluous else statement and comparisons to true. I'd also recommend that you split the process into different methods but I'm sure you've got that covered already. And you might want to use an auxiliary method to obtain the values from the fields. See in this post at my suggestion.
if (!context.InputParameters.Contains("Target") ||
context.InputParameters["Target"] is Entity)
return;
Entity entity = context.InputParameters["Target"] as Entity;
if (entity.LogicalName != "lead")
return;
if (!entity.Attributes.Contains("companyname"))
throw new InvalidPluginExecutionException(
"The company name can only be set by the system.");
String firstName = String.Empty;
if (entity.Contains("firstname"))
firstName = entity["firstname"] as String;
String lastName = String.Empty;
if (entity.Contains("lastname"))
lastName = entity["lastname"] as String;
entity["companyname"] = "This is a test";
//entity["companyname"] = firstName + " " + lastName;
EDIT:
If you still don't get the requested behavior, try the following. (I'm not sure on what level of expertise you are so olease accept my apology if you feel insulted by me mentioning some very basic stuff you've already tried a gazillion times.)
Technical tricks.
Publish all customizations (I do it very often, just in case).
Hit F5 to reload.
Login/logout.
Reboot IIS (if on-premise).
Unregister the plug in, see if the behavior remains. Then re-register it.
Check for forgotten workflows running.
There might be some delays and lags. Once, I actually had both the old old and the new version of a plugin being fired, depending on whether I created a record from Settings or Workplace. That was weird but resolved itself after a few hours. Seriously. That was weird!
Programmatic tricks.
Check if there are other plugins you might have forgotten to deactivate.
Remove all the leads and make sure that the plugin fires upon the new one being created.
Change the text to e.g. I'm a giant moose, just to make sure that the change goes through.
Slash away all code (or place return in the beginning of Execute. Then, move it down step by step to detect when the weirdness commences.
Of what you've shown, it should work so either you didn't mention something relevant (we do appreciated that you didn't post 100000 lines of code, of course) or it's CRM that's weirding off (which is equally annoying and confusing). So, let's trouble-shoot this thing. What happens when you try the tricks above?
As for the code stub, yeah - I'm not too proud of MS effort there. Try to post that code under the tag C# on Programmers for code review. Be prepared for an angry discussion. :)