Beware of the Dynamics CRM Address1 Composite Field

In my last blog article, I mentioned that I had created a new entities to house my provinces and states so that they can be “looked up” and selected by fields in other entities.  This is not an uncommon scenario and Country is frequently another look-up replacement for the OOB (out-of-box) Country field. These are both fields that have standard entries, so they are good candidates for look-ups; this avoids a user from having to type the same data in each time (and prevents typing errors).

CRM customizer beware:

Dynamics CRM 2013 contains a Bing Maps control (and subsequent latitude and longitude fields, which it updates) that rely on information in the newly created address1_composite field for Dynamics CRM 2013. The Address1 composite field contains all of the out-of-the box (OOB) address fields (and is not currently customizable).  If we are creating new look-up fields for provinces or countries that replace the OOB fields, then the Address1 Composite field will not get updated unless it is configured to do so either by workflow or custom code.  One needs to ensure that the out-of-the-box province and country is updated by the newly created province and country look-ups. This is true for ANY replaced address fields for city, province, country and postal/zip code.