Reusable and robust pattern for handling “send email” steps via Processes

Question

Background

Workflows and dialog processes in CRM 2011 (and CRM Online) allow us to send emails to email-enabled records (such as contacts, accounts and users). In the event that the email-enabled record does not have an email address, the process will fail with an exception (workflows remain in waiting state, dialogs throw the exception):

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=5.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]: Object address not found on party or party is marked as non-emailable

My scenario

In many scenarios, faulting the entire process because an email couldn't be sent is heavy-handed (equally I accept that there are many scenarios where this behaviour is desireable too). As an example, if I am creating and updating many records as part of a large workflow and simply wish to send a simple, courtesy confirmation email at the end of the process, I do not want the entire process to fail simply because this final step could not complete. I can add a simple conditional statement to my workflow to check presence of address prior to the send-email step. This works but I (or more specifically, my users) need to remember to do this for every single email step that is created.

Theoretical solutions

Ideally, I would have a child workflow that would accept an email object as input and then I'd run a little check to confirm that there is a sender and recipient before sending the email. If data is missing I could either silently fail the sub-process or invoke different logic such as email the originating user or write an error record.

Howver, given the following....

• Custom workflow assemblies are still not supported in CRM Online
• Workflows do not accept incoming parameters
• Even dialogs don't support an "email object" as an input parameter, or an array of values (e.g. for recipients) as an input parameter
• Child dialogs do not return control to the caller after completion

...I am struggling to conceive of a pattern or solution that would effectively allow me to avoid the users having to remember to put a hard-coded check in every workflow or dialog that they create (to check for the presence of a recipient email address).

Ideally I want something like a generic child-workflow that takes the email object (or a serialisation or other representation of it), makes the checks and sends the email if it can.

Over to you

I've tried to design a custom solution but it quickly gets over-engineered (plugins on system entities etc). Otherwise I can't see a way of avoiding putting the onus on the users. Has anyone else encountered a similar requirement and better still, devised a solution?

Answer 1

Well I can think of a pretty straight forward solution.

1. New field on email - "Auto Send", bit, default No

2. New workflow - Create of Email, If "Auto Send" == Yes && Send contains data && Recipient contains data -> Send Email in context

3. In all your other workflows, instead of using the "Send Email" action, use the "Create Record" action to create an email record, populate the email as normal, but also populate the "Auto Send" field.

This way users can pretty much create an email as normal, but you get to use a single workflow to perform validation logic and actually send it.