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CRMWebAPILoginControl solution

This Visual Studio solution contains a simple login control which uses a slightly modified version of the Microsoft CRM SDK authentication helper classes found on NuGet at Microsoft.CrmSdk.WebApi.Samples.HelperCode.

The CRM SDK Helper code assists in creating an application which can authenticate using OAuth to CRM Online or using windows credentials to a CRM on-premise deployment. For more information about these helper classes, see Use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web API Helper Library (C#).

Contents

Solution Description

This solution has two projects:

CRMWebAPILoginControl
A WPF user control which builds a CRMWebAPILoginControl.dll which is referenced in the TestProject WPF application. The dll includes the definition of a defines a CRMWebAPILoginControl.LoginControl class which displays the UI for users to enter their login information.
TestProject
A simple WPF application project that shows how to reference and use the CRMWebAPILoginControl.LoginControl.

CRMWebAPILoginControl

This project contains three files:

CrmWebAPILoginControl.xaml
Defines the UI to allow entry of connection information and buttons to login.
CrmWebAPILoginControl.xaml.cs
The code-behind for CrmWebAPILoginControl.xaml
ObservableConfiguration.cs
An ObservableConfiguration class that inherits from the SDK Helper Configuration class and implements INotifyPropertyChanged for the ServiceUrl, UserName, and Domain properties. The purpose of this class is simply to facilitate binding to the UI for these properties.

In this project the Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Samples.HelperCode.Authentication.AcquireToken method has been modified slightly to catch an error which occurs if the organization hasn't granted consent to use the application. Rather than simply fail, the error is caught an the user is shown a dialog which will allow them to give consent if they have the privileges to do so.

TestProject

This project contains a reference to the CRMWebAPILoginControl.dll built by the CRMWebAPILoginControl project which provides and is the startup project in the solution. The default MainWindow.xaml file has been modified to display a Connect to CRM button which uses connectButton_Click as the event handler.

The default MainWindow.xaml.cs code-behind file has been modified to include the following:

MainWindow constructor

The constructor initializes an ObservableConfiguration property and this is where you must specify the ClientId and RedirectUrl properties if you need to connect with CRM Online using OAuth. You will need to replace the values for these placeholders:

            //TODO: To connect to CRM Online you must add your application ClientId and redirect URL here:

            config.ClientId = "########-####-####-####-############";
            config.RedirectUrl = "https://yourDomain/yourApp";

You will also find that there are some examples to pre-populate values which is useful for testing because the control doesn't cache the values you enter.

connectButton_Click method

The event handler for the Connect to CRM button in the CrmWebAPILoginControl.xaml. The method will launch an instance of the CRMWebAPILoginControl.LoginControl as a dialog and then process the results using the Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Samples.HelperCode.Authentication class to authenticate the user appropriately.

getHttpClient method

This method returns an HttpClient that is ready to use with the CRM Web API after the user is authenticated. It leverages capabilities within the SDK Helper Authentication and Configuration classes.

ShowUserId method

This method demonstrates using the HttpClient returned by the getHttpClient method to call the WhoAmI Function to retrieve information about the user from their CRM organization. This information is displayed in the UI to confirm authentication occurred.

Remarks

This project provides an example of a re-usable control which leverages the helper classes provided by the CRM SDK team. Compared to the XRM tooling common login control it is lacking the following capabilites:

  • Credential storage and retrieval
  • Support for multiple languages
  • Support for Tracing and logging

But most significantly, it isn't an official release from the CRM product team so it is unsupported by Microsoft.

On the other hand, this login control is very simple because it doesn't have to support all the robust capabilites of the XRM Tooling APIs, which in turn depends on the SDK assemblies. It is possible to leverage the Xrm tooling common login control and allow it to manage authentication, but it does so through the constructs which work with the dependent assemblies and not with the SDK Web API helper classes. This makes things more complicated because you need to keep track of the expiration of the tokens and make a call using the assemblies to refresh the token when it is about to expire.

I'm releasing this on GitHub because it may provide a useful example to developers and also because I am going to use the login control in another project I plan to release soon. I welcome any contributions you can make to this project.