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2 min read

Marketing Lists – Newly Discovered Attributes

Today’s guest blogger is Jerry Weinstock who is the Business Development Manager at CRM Innovation a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. CRM Innovation builds functional enhancements and codeless solutions for Dynamics CRM 4.0.

There are many attributes that come with the CRM system. Most of them have been published on the forms from the get go when you open up the application. The remaining ones have been created in the schema and await our use in customizing an entity form. While doing some work for a new project I happened across 3 attributes in the Marketing List entity I didn’t realize existed. I immediately put one of them to use – Members Count.

The task I was working on was to quickly see the effect of removing or adding contacts from a particular marketing list as I adjusted the count for a post card mailing we were planning on executing. The typical way this would be done is to make the adjustment to the list and then either:

1. Page through each screen in the Form to then multiply the number of records times the number of full pages of records and then add the remaining partial page count.

2. Export to Excel using the Static Worksheet with “Records from all pages in the current view” option. When Excel opens up with the list of records, scroll down to the last row and subtract by one to get the count. Another version of this approach is to export to Excel by creating a Dynamic Worksheet and then just refresh the worksheet as needed to get the revised count.

Both of these approaches are well known work arounds for determining the total number of records returned by a View.

BUT, dumb luck being what it is I discovered three attributes that I had never explored before and one of them exactly met my immediate need – Members Count (schema name: membercount).

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I created a new section on the Marketing List form and began testing the Members Count attribute.

Here is what I have discovered:

1. Members Count is a ‘static’ integer value which is updated only on the On Load event of the form.

2. Adding or Removing list members while the form is open doesn’t change the displayed value (see #1 above).

3. The count only includes Active Members on the list and ignores any members whose record has been deactivated, but is still associated with the list.

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I haven’t explored the use of the Ignore Inactive List Members and Exclude Members Who Opt Out attributes yet.

I am now headed in the direction of exploring pre-existing but unpublished attributes for other entities to see what undiscovered gems might be out there.

Jerry Weinstock