Bulk Activate / Deactivate Records in CRM 2011

We all love bulk delete because it allows bulk deletion to run asynchronously in the background, it allows recurring bulk delete jobs and it lets you enter an Advanced Find query to specify the exact criteria to select which records to delete. But what about bulk de-activation? Luckily there are tools to allow you to extend the bulk delete functionality to bulk (de)activation of records.

If you follow my blog you might be familiar with the CRM 2011 Workflow Utilities project I have been maintaining. Recently, I have extended it to include a custom workflow step for setting the state of multiple records, similar to bulk delete:

1. Runs asynchronously in the background (workflow)

2. Allows you enter a query to specify exactly which records you want to bulk (de)activate (Uses Advanced Find to specify the query)

 

Consider this scenario: Your sales manager needs to be able to manually deactivate multiple accounts when they get old. You might need to deactivate thousands of accounts and cannot expect the sales manager to go page by page clicking the “Deactivate” button. You can certainly not expect the sales manager to write an SDK application to do so ;-)

So once you install the CRM 2011 Workflow Utilities solution available here, you can create a workflow and insert a “Bulk Activate / Deactive” step:

The first parameter is used to define the query that defines which records you want to activate/deactivate. You can click on the lookup icon and then click “New”. In this example, I will create a query to deactivate all active accounts older than 1 year:

The second parameter (Target State) correspond to the state code to which I want to set my records. In this case I want the accounts to become inactive, so the corresponding statecode is 1.Most records in CRM have statecode 0 (for Active) and 1 (for Inactive). If you wanted to bulk activate (instead of deactivate) you would select 0 as your target state.

The third parameter corresponds to the target status. The default status is -1 which corresponds to the default status code for your selected statecode. If you want a different status than the default you can always browse the entity metadata to find the correct value. In this example, I want the status to become “Archived” so I look at the account “statuscode” field to find the corresponding value (100000000):

After configuring my custom step, it will look like this:

Note: There are special entities which you cannot activate/deactivate. For example, cases cannot simply be deactivated. They need to be resolved or cancelled, these special operations are not supported by this tool. Additionally, note that the workflow primary entity is irrelevant for this step since the records to de-activate are specified by the query and it can point to a different entity type.