Early Binding of PreImage in Microsoft CRM 2011

Question

The Microsoft CRM advanced developer extensions have gotten me a little spoiled with their early binding for calls made to CRM's webservices.

I'm writing a plugin right now and I'd like to access attributes defined in the pre-image. All the examples cast the preimage as Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Entity which uses late binding to access it's attributes. I dislike hardcoding all those string's for attribute names into my plugin and would like to find a method that avoids it by using early binding.

Here is an example of a cast

var preMessageImage = (Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Entity)context.PreEntityImages["MyPreImage"]; 

But I have to use late binding to access the properties

var myProperty = preMessageImate.Properties["MyProperty"];

Is there any way to cast this preimage to an xrm object that has all the properties defined using early binding so I don't have to hardcode all the property names?

Answer 1

You should first use the crmsvcutil tool in the SDK to generate "early-bound" Xrm entities and include that code file in your plugin codebase.

I suggest omitting the 'DataContextName' command-line arg so not context is generated.

For more information check here on MSDN: CrmSvcUtil on MSDN

Next, you should use the ToEntity<T> method on the Entity class to get a strongly-typed specific entity. More info here: ToEntity on MSDN