How to create a new record with a particular GUID

Question

Using the Dynamics CRM I'm trying to create an instance of an entity. I would like to manually set the GUID, but if I had the attribute that is the primary key to the DynamicEntity, I get following error.

Service could not process request

I am building a DynamicEntity, and setting the [entityname]id attribute causes the request to fail. It's moving data between two CRM instances, so if anyone knows of a better way to copy records between CRMs, that'd work too. Otherwise, I'd like the GUID to match across instances... as that's the point of a GUID.

Answer 1

Happily, it IS possible to do this across two CRM instances! A co-worker knew the solution, so credit really belongs to him.

My mistake was creating a Property with type UniqueIdentifierProperty. The primary key attribute on an entity needs to be filled in with a KeyProperty. These two properties are nearly identical -- the Property types are, except that one holds a Key, the other a UniqueIdentifier. The Key/UniqueIdentifier both hold GUIDs. (Another day in the mind of Microsoft!)

Precisely, what I'm doing is creating a DynamicEntity, filling in the entity name, and filling in the majority of the attributes. The PK attribute (which you can determine from the metadata) can be filled in with a KeyProperty. I was filling it in with a UniqueIdentifierProperty, which CRM rejects and responds with a nondescript and unhelpful error message.

Answer 2

I apologize if I am over-simplifying the solution, but why not add a custom field in both instances that would be a mirror of the other instances guid?