Asynchronous Merge in Dynamics 365 CRM Power Apps | Power Platform

If you are familiar with Dynamics 365 CRM and it’s Merge feature for records, here’s a new feature that will let you merge records asynchronously and not hold your time on the screen.

Scenario

Below is how Merging operations would run had Asynchronous Merging not been turned on for your environment –

When you select 2 records, you’ll see the Merge button, of course.
And when you see the preferences which you have to select and move the fields into the Active/Master record.
Once you click OK, you’d see this loading screen as the operation would happen in the background.
Now, depending on how many related/child records you had for the selected records, it would take that longer time to process and it’s inefficient to hold your screen while the merging is happening – much like a Synchronous plugin.
The only advantage is that you would know if anything failed.

Let’s look at how you can enable Asynchronous Merge on your environment and how this will affect your experience along with some pet-peeves.

Enable Asynchronous Merge

Given that you have correct rights for your Power Platform Admin Center [PPAC] (https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environments), here’s how you can turn the Asynchronous Merge for your environment –

Select the Environment which you want to enable this on –
Expand the Product section and click on Features.
Now, scroll down till you see the option and you’ll see that it is turned off by default.
You can turn this On and Save the Settings.
Once this is turned on, you can see this –
And that’s it, you’ve turned on the Asynchronous Merge for your environment.
Let’s look at how it will behave in the next step.

Please note that this takes about 20-30 minutes to take effect in my experience.

Behavior

Now, let’s select another pair of records to Merge –

I’ve selected the below records to Merge and I can see the Merge button as well.
And you’ll see your usual dialog box to select the fields you want to merge into the master record.
Now, when you click OK, they’ll be merged post they have completed the Parent Check.
To read more about Parent Checking while merging records, you can check this – Parent Check for Merging Records in Dynamics 365 CRM | Power Apps
And the records will be processed in the background for merging and you can continue to work.
Now, in order to find what happened to the merge operation, you can go to Settings > System Jobs.
And look for this operation.
Once you know how to solve the error (see an example in #3 above), the successful Merge operations’ Job start in the background and you’ll see a toast notification on the top right as below
And then, when you look at the System Jobs, you’ll find that the Job has succeeded.