Background
We are working on cleaning up our CRM system and therefore I was trying to merge two Account records. Very standard and nothing special about the records either. It is something I have done successfully a hundred of times before. But this time was different. I got prompted with a Duplicate Record error.
Process
Usually, when i get these system errors, it always helps to download the error log file and look at the info in there. This time, however, the button was not active, so this was not going to give me anything more. So the next step is to try and figure out what the real reason for the error is.
I looked through the list of Accounts to see if there is another record with the same values. There wasn’t.
Next step was to try and see if there are any special values that stand out, as the error does say to select one or more unique values. This was a needle in a hay stack.
After I gave up on looking for a specific value, I started to look into related entities. I had also ruled out security roles and privileges as I am the system administrator.
Solution
Looking into the related entities was the key. When looking through the different entities I found that users had created a relationship between the two Accounts I was trying to merge.
After I removed the relationship, it was possible to merge the two Accounts without any problems.
Conclusion
These system errors are quite frequent, but they do get tricky to troubleshoot, when there isn’t the possibility to download the more precise error log. As I was researching the issue, I also found that Dynamics CRM Tip of the Day had also made a post about this or at least rather similar issue. So if my fix doesn’t solve your issue, then you should surely check out their tip #927.
