Monday 7 April 2014

Controlling Duplicate Detection

The CRM SDK messages CreateRequest and UpdateRequest support a configuration parameter "SuppressDuplicateDetection" that provides control over whether duplicate detection rules will be applied - see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh210213(v=crm.6).aspx. However, this parameter is not available through over programmatic means (such as the REST endpoint) to create or update records.

To workaround this, I created a plugin that sets the "SuppressDuplicateDetection" parameter based on the value of a boolean attribute that can included in the Entity instance that is created or updated.

I've posted the source code to the MSDN Code Gallery here

I created this because I had a need to apply duplicate detection rules to entities created via the REST endpoint in CRM 2011.

It may be that this plugin could also be used as a way to revert the CRM 2013 behaviour back to that of CRM 2011, to allow duplicate detection rules to fire on CRM forms. However, I've yet to test this fully; if anybody wants to test it, feel free to do so and make comments on this post. Otherwise, I'll probably update this post if I find anything useful with the CRM 2013 interface.