2.0 webservice InsertOrUpdate

Question

I am working with some 2.0 custom objects and am trying to insert/update records in CRM through the web service API with C#. I know in web service 1.0 there was an InsertOrUpdate method. Is there anything similar in 2.0 or do I need to query CRM OD first find if there is already a record existing and then do either an insert or an update.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi,
So I need to query CRM first to find if a record exists to determine if I need to do an Insert or an Update? This seems not to be not too efficient. This really depends on the design of the application your are building. As recommended in our best practices contained in the WS User Guide:
Performance of the Update and Insert Methods Versus the InsertOrUpdate Method
If you use Web Services v1.0, designing your application to use the Insert and Update methods may
result in an increase in throughput compared to using the InsertOrUpdate method. This is due to the
additional business logic and SQL statements executed during the InsertOrUpdate operation to
determine whether the submitted records match any existing records in the Oracle CRM On Demand
database. The performance and throughput improvement may not be apparent at lower volumes,
but high volume applications could benefit from the direct update and insert operation, which does
not require the additional business logic to determine whether the records already exist.
The InsertOrUpdate method is a more costly operation than either the Insert or the Update method independently. We recommend that customers design their applications such that whenever possible they send the appropriate request (i.e. if your requests are user driven, then the user should be able to decide between creating a new record and updating an existing record, if they are batch driven then you may wish to store the CRM On Demand RowId value in your original data source to indicate that the record already exists in CRMOD, or use the ExternalSystemId as your user key (see below)).
Can I specify both on a single object and then the insert will fail if that object already exists and the update will execute?We do not recommend sending requests concurrently. If there is absolutely no way for you to know whether a record already exists in CRMOD, they you could start by performing an Insert request. If that request fails with an error that a record with identical values already exists, then you could issue an update request. Any other failure would be handled appropriately. Depending on whether the bulk of your operations are Inserts or Updates you should adjust your design accordingly (just reverse the order of the Insert and Update requests). One further point to note, in order to perform an update you need to be able to uniquely identify a record within CRM On Demand, if you are not already planning on using the <ExternalSystemId>, you should consider using this as the user key value for your update statements.
You do not need to perform a query to determine that the record already exists if you have a user key value available for the Update statement, simply perform the desired operation and handle the error within your code. To be clear though, I would recommend evaluating the design to see if it's possible to identify specific scenarios in which the Insert or Update request is appropriate instead of relying on InsertOrUpdate in all cases.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Sean