How to correct the wrong label ID appearance in address and contact information purposes

Recently, there were some people experiencing some data issues in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. Instead of translated text, some label IDs, like @SYS90909, were showing up in the address and contact information purposes. Why can you have this wrong behavior and how to solve this? These questions are the reason for this post.

What is the issue?

When your user is setup to use another language than English (United States), the data in the table for address and contact information purposes can be incorrect like shown in the next screenshot.

In my case, I changed the default user language to Dutch to reproduce the issue. If you wonder why the labels on the forms are still in English, you have to read my next blog. I wanted to show the English labels for your understanding. There are various deployments and versions having this issue. I read a community question on the forum, but also colleagues reached out to me. Even I do have environments where this issue exists. However, it is unclear in what version or deployment it exists. It could be because of a wrong demo data set in various versions. Because there are environments new deployed with a certain version, but also environments upgraded, there is no definition which environments have this issue.

The question from several people is if it will be solved if the labels will be corrected in Visual Studio. The answer is ‘No’. As part of a new deployment, a new database will be setup with initial setup data. The data for the address and contact information purposes is inserted during the setup. At that time, the label IDs will be attempted to be resolved per language. As there is current data, new or changed labels, will not execute initialization jobs again.

I have checked the preview of version 10.0.8. A fresh deployment had the correct information. When I wanted to check the used labels, I found out that they have been replaced with new ones. So, instead of @SYS90909, now a label from the model Directory has been used. This looks like Microsoft is moving legacy SYS and SYP labels to the correct models. When exactly the label change was applied is unknown to me. I’m not in the mood to evaluate all different deployments.

At least, the good news is that the issue has been solved already for future deployments. So only your wrong data needs to be fixed.

How to correct data

Enough background information provided… Now you want to solve the issue in your environment. As mentioned above, an label change is not solving the data issue. You can go to the Address and contact information purposes form (Path: Organization administration > Global address book) and edit the information.

Click Edit to start correcting the data in the grid. You can also manage all languages via the button Translations.

When you change the Language field, you can see and correct the data for all languages used in your organization.

Is there a more easy way?

You will probably think that editing the language descriptions is a cumbersome method. It will take too much time and you might be unsure about the correct translations. In that case, I fully agree with you. Correcting one language manually would be possible, but the total translations for the address and contact information purposes has over 800 records.

For your convenience (and mine), I created a data package with the correct translations for these address and contact information purposes. You can find the package on my Dynamicspedia share (OneDrive). You may download this package and import it in your environment. If you open the zip-file you can check the contents to be sure it will only contain the translations. Additionally, my next disclaimer:

Attention: The use of the data package is at your own risk. The package only contains all address and contact information purposes with their translations based on the Contoso demo data set. If you deleted or changed purposes in your environment, check the contents first, as it will insert the standard purposes again. You can modify the records in the Excel sheet before importing the details. Ensure, you test it in a staging environment fist.

Import the data package

Navigate to the Data Management workspace and start an Import project. Provide a Group name and Description. Then click Add file to add the package and extract the package details.

When the file has been recognized, you can Close the dialog and click Import. The Execution form will be opened. You can wait and refresh the data until the process is completed. You can also continue working and check the end result later.

Now when the data package has been completed, you can check the result for your languages.