Convert lead to contact, account and/or opportunity programmatically

Update: The codeproject missed a line of code. After you have executed the InitializeFromRequest, then you'll get a InitializeFromResponse. This response has got a entity in it. This entity you will need to create. The entity does not yet get created by executing the InitializeFromRequest! The line to add is:

Guid entityId = service.Create(rps.Entity);

Today I needed some code which does convert a lead to a contact programmatically. Instead of just building, I first asked my mate Google if he knew how to do that. Kind as Google is, he told me that he didn't know, but he knew that Cem Onvar knows that. Cem has published the code on the codeproject website.

Basically it comes down to two steps. The first step is to disable the lead. This can be done by using the SetStateLeadRequest. The second step is to use an request class which is quite rare. It's the InitializeFromRequest class. On this class you can set the EntityMoniker attribute to the lead which you just disabled. On the same request you'll need to set the target entityname to the name of the entity you wish to convert the lead into (contact, account or opportunity) and you'll need to set the TargetFieldType. This would most likely be TargetFieldType.All. Now execute that request and you're done.

For the direct code look at the codeproject site.

Keep in mind that you can use this approach for all kind of conversions.