CRM 3.0 provided limited support for importing data from external files. We were only allowed to import data of few entities like Account, Contact, Lead etc.
This feature has been greatly enhanced in version 4.0. The import tool now allows to import data into most of the entities. It also allows for Mapping of attribute values especially for Picklist type of attributes.
One of the shortcomings though is that it doesn’t update existing records. It will always create new records from the import file. The work around for this would be to develop your own custom application using CRM SDK.
We found that companies receive Price Lists from their vendors on a regular basis and they were required to import and update the prices in CRM for the Products. Since the Import tool would not work in this scenario we had to develop an import tool.
Using SDK we create/update Price List Items (the entity that stores the prices). Price Lists Items are created as a unique combination of Product/Unit and Price List. A change in either of these 3 attributes will result in a new Price List Item record.
Once we were able to create/update Price List Item, we extended it further to take care of scenarios where the Product itself does not exist in CRM. In this case to import the price we were required to first create the Product in CRM and then create a Price List Item for that product. Note that Product entity has few of its attributes mandatory so you need to take care of this in the External file so that the product can be created successfully.
With a successful implementation of this, we went a step further to generalize this tool so that the tool could be used to import and set the values for any of the attributes of Product or Price List Item. This was not too difficult. The only requirement was that the column name in the external file should match the attribute’s schema name in the Product or Price List Item entity. With this requirement satisfied you can now set the values for custom attributes on your product entity.
Any SDK developer with good knowledge of Dynamics CRM can take the above route and validation to develop an Import tool for repetitively importing product price list in CRM. For those who do not want to reinvent the wheel, you can contact us or any other third party developers who must have developed this product already. More information at
http://www.inogic.com/addons_price_list.htm