Set customer rating by workflow

Have you ever been tasked with implementing a system for rating the customer acccounts in MS CRM? Many clients have different rules for rating their MS CRM accounts. The concept is basically that the account is given a rating in different disciplines, and the total determines the general standing of the account.

This is often accomplished in JavaScript, but in my opinion this is a rather poor approach. First of all because I hate JavaScript, but more important because JavaScript only fires when a user opens the account form. There's a lot of scenarios where this isn't sufficient:

• You're importing data from other sources and wants to use them in a campaign without actually open them
• You have lot's and lot's of accounts in your database, but they are seldom opened - in that case you should probably consider some sort of maintenance function
• Your system's integrated with other systems, who might change information without human intervention
• Etc

The code is pretty simple. This example uses hard-coded values of A, B and C, and requieres drop down lists with those values. Perhaps not the most elegant solution - I should probably have read out the values from a settings entity or something in order to avoid the hard coding. On the other hand I have never come across a client who was very inventive in their ratings

Anyway, the following code will accomplish the task:

[CrmWorkflowActivity("Rating")] public class Rating : SequenceActivity { protected override ActivityExecutionStatus Execute(ActivityExecutionContext executionContext) { IContextService contextService = (IContextService)executionContext.GetService(typeof(IContextService)); IWorkflowContext context = contextService.Context; ICrmService crmService = context.CreateCrmService(); //Possible ratings char[] ratings = new char[] { 'A', 'B', 'C' }; //Combinations: string rating = this.CriteriaOne.ToUpper () + this.CriteriaOne.ToUpper () + this.CriteriaOne.ToUpper (); //A equals 1, B equals 2 and C equals 3. Max 9, min 3. 3-5 equals a total A, 6-7 equals B 8-9 equals C //Alternately a single A criteria can generate a total rating of A if this is specified int i = 0; bool A = false; foreach (char c in rating) { if (c == 'A') { i = i + 1; A = true; } if (c == 'B') { i = i + 2; } if (c == 'C') { i = i + 3; } } if(i<6) totalrating = "A"> 5) && (i< totalrating = "B"> 7) { this.TotalRating = "C"; } if (this.ARating.Value) { if (A) { this.TotalRating = "A"; } } return ActivityExecutionStatus.Closed; } public static DependencyProperty CriteriaOneProperty = DependencyProperty.Register ("CriteriaOne", typeof (System.String), typeof (Rating)); [CrmInput("Criteria One")] public string CriteriaOne { get { return base.GetValue (CriteriaOneProperty).ToString (); } set { base.SetValue (CriteriaOneProperty, value); } } public static DependencyProperty CriteriaTwoProperty = DependencyProperty.Register ("CriteriaTwo", typeof (System.String), typeof (Rating)); [CrmInput ("Criteria Two")] public string CriteriaTwo { get { return base.GetValue (CriteriaTwoProperty).ToString (); } set { base.SetValue (CriteriaTwoProperty, value); } } public static DependencyProperty CriteriaThreeProperty = DependencyProperty.Register ("CriteriaThree", typeof (System.String), typeof (Rating)); [CrmInput ("Criteria Three")] public string CriteriaThree { get { return base.GetValue (CriteriaThreeProperty).ToString (); } set { base.SetValue (CriteriaThreeProperty, value); } } public static DependencyProperty ARatingProperty = DependencyProperty.Register ("ARating", typeof (CrmBoolean), typeof (Rating)); [CrmInput ("Return always A if one criteria is A)] public CrmBoolean ARating { get { return (CrmBoolean)base.GetValue (ARatingProperty); } set { base.SetValue (ARatingProperty, value); } } public static DependencyProperty TotalRatingProperty = DependencyProperty.Register ("TotalRating", typeof (System.String), typeof (Rating)); [CrmOutput ("Total Rating")] public string TotalRating { get { return this.GetValue (TotalRatingProperty).ToString (); } set { this.SetValue (TotalRatingProperty, value); } } }

The code reads three different criterias from picklists, evaluates them and returns the average which can be used to generate a total rating. Some clients would like an 'A'-rating in one criteria to override the others, so this is a configurable option.

If you need more criterias than three, just add more properties and assign them other values.