Dynamics CRM Tools

I received some improvement requests from some users of my XrmToolBox and, as you know, it is so easy to develop tools for the XrmToolBox that I did what was asked, which is: Converting the CRM 4.0 tool Access Checker for CRM 2011 : So, this is a new tool. It allows you to check what access have a specific user for a specific record. You can define an entity, search for a specific record and a specific user and see what access rights are available. Working with user views in View Layout Replicator : Yes, you can now propagate a user view layout to a system view and vice versa. Of course, you need read and write access to these user views since CRM security can’t be bypassed regarding userview. If the user view has not been shared with you with read and write access, the tool won’t work. As usual, you can find everything on CodePlex

Today, I receive a really generous donation from mister C. (he will recognized himself, thanks again) and I thought it was time to see some facts and numbers about my “work” for the CRM community. Tools As you might know, my contributions to the CRM community is mainly made of tools. So here is the download statistics from CodePlex (numbers since February 20th 2011, I don’t have statistics for my CRM 4.0 tools). Tool Download count SiteMap Editor 17452 Ribbon Editor 9006 CrmDiagTool 2011 8065 View Layout Replicator 4745 JavaScript WebResource Manager 4705 Metadata Document Generator 4620 Ribbon Browser 2249 Attribute Bulk Updater 2027 Role Updater 1714 WebResource Manager 1245 Connection Controls 1120 Solution Import 997 Iconator 703 XrmToolBox 562 TOTAL 58648 Numbers of downloads will obviously decrease since I have one tool instead of many. But I’m not participating to a competition and the ToolBox is s...

Do you know this great feature of CodePlex? You can subscribe to project releases and each time a new version is available, you receive an email. As I won’t blog each time there is a new version, the best way to be notified of a new version is to follow the project and subscribe to notifications of the release page. It is really simple, you just need a CodePlex account (which can be linked to your Microsoft account), go to the XrmToolBox downloads page, and click on the link “get email notifications” Then, when a new release is available, you receive an email like the following for today’s update:

Hi guys, no, I won’t talk about my HTML/JS grid in this post even if you expect it ! Wait couple of days, I’m in the process of improving performance… I just wanted to notice a new version of the XrmToolBox which has minor improvements, but has a new tool: the Fetch Xml tester. It was a personnal tool I was using when writing my fetchXml queries and as I needed it for my HTML/JS grid, I transformed it in a XrmToolBox plugin (see screenshot below). To see others improvements or download the new version, go to the Download Page

In last December, I was asked to write a web resource to display a grid with CRM records. I was quite frustrated because I didn’t succeed to manage some grid features easily like fixed header with horizontal scrolling among others. I delivered a fixed table which was not so bad but absolutely not something that look like the application grid views. So I decided to work harder to find a way to do this CRM style grid view. After some works (almost two full days), I have succeeded to create a full featured CRM grid view by using only JavaScript. Here is a screenshot: And this is how I can create a grid view from only a div in a HTML page < html > < head > < title > Page de test </ title > < script src ="json2.js"></ script > < script src ="jquery.js"></ script > < script src ="XrmServiceToolKit.js"></ script > < script src ="sdk.metadata.js"></ script > ...

If you visit the XrmToolbox CodePlex download page , you will notice two new files: A Visual Studio 2012 project template to help you create your own tool A development guide (based on the project template) that explains how to write it to be sure it fits correctly with the XrmToolbox. If you develop your own tool and would like to share it with the community, I will be glad to make some noise about it on my blog or even on the XrmToolbox CodePlex page. Happy coding!

Today, I want to share a really nice feature that was shipped with the latest version of the SDK: the possibility to query metadata (entity, attribute, relationships,…). Before this update, we have to get so many data just to have an entity object type code or icon url. Now, you can query just what you want (filter) and select what data will be returned: so cool! Here is a quick sample that returns only custom entities logical name and object type code var filter = new MetadataFilterExpression ( LogicalOperator .And); filter.Conditions.Add( new MetadataConditionExpression ( "IsCustomEntity" , MetadataConditionOperator .Equals, true )); var properties = new MetadataPropertiesExpression (); properties.PropertyNames.AddRange( "LogicalName" , "ObjectTypeCode" ); //An entity query expression to combine the filter expressions and property expressions for the query. var entityQueryExpression = new EntityQueryExpression { Criteria = filter, Properties = properti...