Get EntityReference from Organization-Service using oDATA REST and JavaScript

Question

I'm trying to get the information of the customer of a campaign response in Dynamics CRM 2016 (on-premise). Because I'm on an entity form I want to use JavaScript for the REST queries.

Retrieving the information of the campaign response is not the problem. In the response XML though, the PartyId is of type EntityReference

... <!-- more XML omitted -->
<d:PartyId m:type="Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Data.Services.EntityReference">
          <d:Id m:type="Edm.Guid">13cb3e39-46c5-e711-80ce-005056a04f81</d:Id>
          <d:LogicalName>contact</d:LogicalName>
          <d:Name>Jane Doe</d:Name>
          <d:RowVersion m:null="true" />
        </d:PartyId>
...<!-- more XML omitted -->

So now the problem is, I can't directly query dynamics for a contact using

https://example.com/OrganizationName/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/contactSet(guid'13cb3e39-46c5-e711-80ce-005056a04f81')

I get the following error

<error>
<code/>
<message xml:lang="de-DE">Resource not found for the segment 'contactSet'.</message>
</error>

because it's an EntityReference.

There does not seem to be an Endpoint like

https://example.com/OrganizationName/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/EntityReferenceSet(guid'13cb3e39-46c5-e711-80ce-005056a04f81')

I can't figure out how to retrieve the target of an entity reference using REST and Javascript. Is anybody out there who knows how to do it?

What I know from the C# framework is, that an EntityReference is only a Container that holds the real information about an referenced entity. So the ID that is given by

<d:PartyId m:type="Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Data.Services.EntityReference">
          <d:Id m:type="Edm.Guid">13cb3e39-46c5-e711-80ce-

is only the ID of the EntityReference and has to be resolved to the real ID of the contacts entity. But how?

Sergey Tunnik Sergey Tunnik · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-25T13:50:47

You should be able to query entities using OData endpoint:

https://example.com/OrganizationName/api/data/v8.0/contacts(13cb3e39-46c5-e711-80ce-005056a04f81)

or WCF\SOAP

https://example.com/OrganizationName/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/ContactSet(guid'13cb3e39-46c5-e711-80ce-005056a04f81')

Both links work properly on D365 v9 on-prem. But I don't have env to test directly on CRM 2016.

Get EntityReference from Organization-Service using oDATA REST and JavaScript

2 Answers