How to Solve Default Value Issue with Two Options Fields in Dynamics CRM 2016

Adam Murchison, 28 September 2017

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 on premise has an interesting issue where Two Options fields are automatically set to the default value, without a user updating them. The change appears in the Audit History and can occur when no plugins, workflows, JavaScript, or Business Rules are configured on an entity.

The example below shows the Audit History for an Email. There is a field called “Direction” which is a Two Options field with the values “Outgoing” and “Incoming”. A user tried to send an email from Dynamics CRM 2016 and noticed that the “Direction” had automatically been changed to “Incoming”. This meant that the email could not be sent.

Sometimes the Audit History would show that the “Direction” had changed from “Incoming” to “Incoming”, which left a lot of users scratching their heads.

We could reproduce the issue on demand by opening a record, and quickly navigating to one of the related records via the navigation bar at the top of the screen. The form would crash and get stuck on the “Loading” screen. In the background, data is submitted back to the Dynamics CRM 2016 database setting Two Options fields back to their default values. Turning on CRM tracing confirmed that an “update” command was executed in SQL.

How to fix this?

Microsoft released an update named “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Service Pack 1.1” which can be downloaded here. Microsoft stated they released a fix for: “When you switch between the main form and the related records in CRM, occasionally the Boolean fields (two options) are reset to the default value and will be submitted to the CRM database.”

In short, Microsoft is aware of this error and released a fix for all. Please refer to the Microsoft document and get this fixed so that all data is preserved.