Conditionally Empty Entity Reference
Paul asked 6 years ago
Is it possible to handle a lookup (entity reference) when importing to CRM where the source column and, hence, the result, *might* be empty? I can’t manually build the entity reference in a calculation because the CRM SDK assemblies aren’t referenced and trying to build an Entity Reference field type fails with, “Failed to set column xxx to an entity reference column : Unrecognized Guid format,” when the value should actually be null.
Answers
Ethan Sorenson Staff answered 6 years ago
Paul,
Lookup fields cannot be blank. If they are blank, then the lookup will fail and give you an error. A work around would be to have a holding value rather than leaving it blank.
For example, if you are updating a Contact with the Account, but some contacts don’t have an Account for you to associate them with, you will want to create a dummy account that you will map as your value if the source does not contain an account.
In your mapping you will create a Calculated Column that will check if the source contains a value for account. If it doesn’t, return your dummy account, else return the value in the source. Then map this calculated column to your entity reference.
Lookup fields cannot be blank. If they are blank, then the lookup will fail and give you an error. A work around would be to have a holding value rather than leaving it blank.
For example, if you are updating a Contact with the Account, but some contacts don’t have an Account for you to associate them with, you will want to create a dummy account that you will map as your value if the source does not contain an account.
In your mapping you will create a Calculated Column that will check if the source contains a value for account. If it doesn’t, return your dummy account, else return the value in the source. Then map this calculated column to your entity reference.
Nannette replied 5 years ago How would I handle this if I have to have the value in the source do a lookup for the GUID? The field is either blank or populated with data that I have to perform a lookup on. I am not sure how to get an if/else statement in there.