Crm 2013 – Upgrading from an ex-Crm 1.2 organisation

This post should only affect a small fraction of Crm 2013 users, but if you do have a CRM organisation that was first created in Crm 1.2, and upgraded through the versions to Crm 2013, you may get an “unexpected error” message when opening account contact or lead records that had been created in Crm 1.2 (I told you this wouldn’t affect many people, but we do still have, and interact with, customers from Crm 1.2 days).

The cause of this is the ‘merged’ attribute. Record merging (for accounts, contacts and leads) was introduced in Crm 3.0, and a ‘merged’ attribute was created to track if a record had been merged. For all records created in Crm 3.0 and higher, this attribute was set to false, but for records created in Crm 1.2, the attribute was null.

This causes a problem in the RTM build of Crm 2013. If you enable tracing, you will see an error like the following:

Crm Exception: Message: An unexpected error occurred., ErrorCode: -2147220970, InnerException: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at Microsoft.Crm.BusinessEntities.RecordDisabledMergedNotificationGenerator.BusinessLogic(IBusinessEntity entity, IOrganizationContext context, NotificationAdder notificationAdder)

So, that’s the problem. There are three ways to fix it:

• If you’ve already upgraded, then the quick, but unsupported, fix is via direct SQL statements that set the merged attribute to false (see below)
• If you have not yet upgraded, you can merge each affected record in turn with a dummy record, which will set the merged attribute.
• You can automate the merge process programmatically by submitting a merge request for each record, and passing appropriate parameters. I’m not sure if this will work after the upgrade, or only before, as I’ve not tried it

Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), the merged attribute is not ValidForUpdate, so you can’t use a simple, supported update request to set the attribute

The SQL statements for an unsupported fix:

update contact set merged = 0 where merged is null

update account set merged = 0 where merged is null
update lead set merged = 0 where merged is null