Using CRM from an external website – part 2: research

Summer season is always a hard season to spend time behind your computer, the tempation of relaxing and spending time with your family and friends is big. But then guilt and curiousity win and I crawl back to my computer…

In the intro article, I drew a scenario that I want to implement. I want to embed CRM functionality within an external website. By an external website I mean a website running on a different webserver that has to rely on scripting to authenticate and communicate with CRM. My goal is to create an easy to use library that handles all the nasty bits and bytes.

This raises a couple of questions… 

How do I authenticate?

How do I use CRM services?

How can I make it easy to use?

The first two questions can be resolved by doing research. It is a matter of discovering on how to set the authentication calls and create a user context. Furthermore I need to find out how to fire various calls to the CRM services.

No time to loose, time to hit the web to get some background information and to find some answers.

Authentication:

• Authenticating from a Node.js client to Dynamics CRM via AD FS and OAuth2
  Working and documented example of connecting non windows platforms to CRM.
• SOAP Only Authentication Using C# (Jason Lattimer’s Blog )
  Thanks to Guido Preite, I stumbled on this article. Though the article is describing a C# approach, the same can be accomplished by porting the calls to javascript. All heavy lifting seems to be done. The soap calls are described in the code.
• The CRM Book – Authentication models (Power Objects)
  This article provides some background information on what authentication models are supported by Dynamics CRM.
• Use OAuth to Authenticate with the CRM Service – The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog
  Technical information from the Microsoft Dynamics team.

CRM Service calls:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 – Calling Custom Actions Using JavaScript (Plus Consulting)
  An example in javascript to call custom CRM actions using javascript
• Dynamics CRM and AngularJS: OData Endpoint and $resource (Sonoma Partners)
  An example of calling the organization service using REST API
• Use web service data in web resources (OData and Modern app SOAP endpoint) – MSDN
  MSDN Article on using webservice data
• Use the OData endpoint with web resources – MSDN
  MSDN article, containing links to the CRM REST Builder (Jason Lattimer) and OData Query Designer (Rhett Clinton)

The CRM Service calls part is not that difficult, the challenge is to wrap it up in a friendly and generic manner. I expect that the authentication will be difficult to implement. Fortunately, I’ll get some transatlantic help (thanks Jake: additional brain power is appreciated).

In the next part I’ll focus on the CRM Service calls part. For now I’ve some homework to do.