{Dynamics CRM + Web API Actions} Execute action with an Entity as input parameter using Web API in Dynamics CRM 2016

“Executing action using Web API” – well this is a topic which has become banal. It’s been talked about, people are using it every now and then in their projects. After all 2016 has just swayed away the consultants and customers alike. In-fact I wrote a blog on the same topic almost 6 months back in January when CRM 2016 was in it’s early days.

https://debajmecrm.com/invoke-your-custom-action-from-dynamics-crm-web-apidynamics-crm-2016/

Although this blog post was much appreciated and I cannot thank the readers more for this, I have getting repeated questions about multiple scenarios related to this and one of them is – How do I execute a global action using Web API with an entity as input parameter. Mostly in the examples shared on the blog, the input parameters are boolean and string.

So I decided to pen it down here. So let’s take a very simple example here.

For this demo, I have created an action named ‘Test Action’. That is a global action with Entity as the input parameter. The Entity type is account.

Now coming to the code. Below is the sample code to do the same.

function callAction() {

    var organizationUrl = Xrm.Page.context.getClientUrl();

    var account = {};
    account.name = "Test Account Name";
    account.description = "This account was created for action test.";
    account.revenue = 2000000.00; // decimal
    account.donotphone = true; //boolean field
    //account.logicalname = "account";
    var data = { "EntityArg": account };

    var query = "new_TestAction";
    var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
    req.open("POST", organizationUrl + "/api/data/v8.0/" + query, true);
    req.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
    req.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8");
    req.setRequestHeader("OData-MaxVersion", "4.0");
    req.setRequestHeader("OData-Version", "4.0");
    req.onreadystatechange = function () {
        if (this.readyState == 4) {
            req.onreadystatechange = null;
            if (this.status == 200) {
                var data = JSON.parse(this.response);

            } else {
                var error = JSON.parse(this.response).error;
                alert(error.message);
            }
        }
    };

    req.send(window.JSON.stringify(data));
}

 

What the sample code is doing here? Well this extremely complex code is dynamically creating an account and then passing it. You can however retrieve an existing account and pass it as well. However here I am creating the account dynamically and passing it.

Simple piece of code. Hope this helps!