How to Manually Modify the “Created On” Field of Dynamics CRM 2011 – Part 2

Vincent Zhong, 05 September 2012

In my previous blog post, I have talked about the need to manually modify the “Created On” date and how to do it programmatically. In this blog post I will show you how to modify it when you are importing data.

 

First of all, here are some conclusions we drew from my last blog post:

1. If you just modify the “Created On” field in your program, it won’t do anything.

2. If you change “Record Created On” field to the date value you want, that value will be copied to the “Created On” field, and the time you run your program will be populated into “Record Created On” field.

3. CRM will check if the “Created On” field has been modified. If it is, it will use “Record Created On” field to keep a copy of the actually “Created On” value.

So based on that, I assume it works the same way when I import data, you need to modify the “Record Created On (overriddencreatedon)” field instead of the “Created On (created)” field, so I used the following CSV file to try.

 

But when I was in the “Map Fields” screen, I came across an issue:

 

I can’t chose the “Record Created On” field from the dropdown list of “CRM Fields”, which means the “Import Data Wizard” won’t let me access to that field, so I have to map it to the “Created On” field.

 

Based on the first conclusion we drew last time, if you modify the “Created On” field directly, it won’t do anything, as CRM will ignore all the action you made to that field. So I didn’t expect it will work, but let’s have a look at the result:

 

Yes it works. I ran the import today, which is “27/08/12”, but I have changed the “Created On” date to “24/01/2012”.

The outcome is pretty much the same as we modify that field programmatically, the value we want will be put into the “Created On” field, and will be used across CRM. The actual created on date will be saved into the “Record Created On” field, for reference purpose.

But the only difference is the “Import Data Wizard” has done all the hard work for us. We don’t need to worry about “Record Created On” field at all. We can even just treat it as a normal field. Just fill in the date we want, and CRM will do the mapping.  

Thanks for reading.