A customer of ours uses the newest version of the Dynamics CRM (4.0), and
encountered a problem when he tried to delete test data.
The customer entered some test data in the CRM prior using it productively.
When they decided to delete the test data from the system, they noticed that
they are not able to so, because the entities are “closed” and thereby read
only. At the moment their CRM has now test data mixed with productive data,
and we are looking for a solution to remove the test data from their database.
Here’s what we tried until now, without success:
Using the GUI
The GUI does not seem to contains functionality to delete a closed entity (a
quote for example). Also I did not find a way to “unlock” the entity: when I
choose to revise a quote, the system creates a duplicate and the old entity
remains and cannot be deleted.
Using the Webservice
I tried to remove the entities using the a Webservice-Client written in c#,
by using the Delete Command as well as the BulkDeleteRequest with the Execute
Method of the Webservice. Deleting failed on all read only entities. I guess
the reason is that the Webservice methods are bound to the same business
rules.
How could we remove such read only entries from the CRM properly? Is there a
way to delete them directly or clear the read-only status and then delete
them afterwards?
Additionally we noticed that deleted entities are not removed from the
database, but are only marked as deleted. Is there a way to physically remove
them from the database (I noticed that the CRMDeletionService.exe has been
removed in this version of the CRM)?
Any ideas/feedback would be appreciated.
With best regards
