Why Unique Identification Number (UID)?

The Regulatory & Legal departments of Governments across the globe in certain circumstances, enforce the use of their National Identity Number in Information Systems of businesses. Enforcing these numbers in CRM helps in avoiding duplicate contact records in CRM and search customers easily.

Listing below some identity numbers used across the globe

1. India – Aadhaar Number
2. US – Social Security Number (SSN)
3. UK – National Insurance Number (NI No)
4. Australia – Customer Reference Number (CRN)

Let’s take the Indian scenario; the Indian Government enforces the capture of Aadhaar number by businesses as part of the Know Your Customer(KYC) process. To support this KYC requirement, we leverage Microsoft Dynamics365 Customer Engagement’s feature called “Keys”.

The following customisation steps help in capturing the Aadhaar Unique Identification Number on the Contact entity

1. Create a custom ‘Single Line of Text’ field on Contact entity  with 14 characters length
2. Configure the UID Key

This approach ensures duplicate contact record creation with same UID is blocked in the system in the following ways

1. Data entry through forms
2. Bulk Data Import
3. Programmatically through web service calls

For Developers, providing the below code snippets that provide an overview of Create/Upsert operations leveraging UID

Create Request

Entity contact = new Entity(“contact”);
contact[“firstname”] = “D”;
contact[“lastname”] = “U”;
contact[“duit_aadhaarnumber”] = “1234-1234-1234”;
crmServiceClient.Create(contact);

Upsert Request

KeyAttributeCollection aadhaarUniqueIdentificationNumber = new KeyAttributeCollection();
aadhaarUniqueIdentificationNumber.Add(new KeyValuePair<string, object>(“duit_aadhaarnumber”, “1234-1234-1234”));

contact = new Entity(“contact”, aadhaarUniqueIdentificationNumber);
contact[“firstname”] = “D”;
contact[“lastname”] = “U”;

UpsertRequest createOrUpdateAPersonRequest = new UpsertRequest();
createOrUpdateAPersonRequest.Target = contact;
UpsertResponse createOrUpdateAPersonResponse = (UpsertResponse)crmServiceClient.Execute(createOrUpdateAPersonRequest);

The following message is thrown if a CRM user or code attempts to create a duplicate entry for a Contact with an Aadhaar number already existing in a Contact record.

A record that has the attribute values Aadhaar already exists. The entity key UID requires that this set of attributes contains unique values. Select unique values and try again.

At DU IT Consulting we strive to deliver the best Customer Relationship Software (CRM) software solutions using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.