Dynamics CRM Tools

Last week, David J. was asking to the MVP list how to get more accurate data when comes the time to translate CRM customizations. His concern was to get contextual information about the terms to translate. I can only agree with him… When exporting translations, you just get an ID and the term to translate. You don’t know where it is used… So my next tool will be a tool that exports data to translate, but with contextual information. The tool will of course be able to import these data back to the CRM application. Export and import will be managed in a supported way using web services only. What will be included Entity names and descriptions Attribute name and description Boolean, Picklist, State and Status OptionSet Attribute labels View name and description Form name and description Form Tabs name Form Section name Form Field name All these items have been tested successfully on UR12 organization. I still need to check if new forms are structured in the same way th

Last week, I worked on more than just tools embeded in the XrmToolBox. I worked on the XrmToolBox itself. Here is a (quite) big list of improvment. So, it’s only a week since the last version but it worth it… If you are too lazy to read the article and want to download the new version now, go on CodePlex . Prerequisites check There is so many people asking me why they got errors or why there is no tool listed when launching the XrmToolBlox that I decided to add some check features. Now, if you don’t have Windows Identity Foundation 3.5 installed, you get the following message More, if tools assemblies are blocked by Windows (it happens), this message is displayed Connection The toolbox now uses the Microsoft.Xrm.Client namespace to manage connection. The code is easier to read and maintain. The code is updated but the UI is too. Especially when you want to connect to an online organization, you don’t have to type the server name anymore. You just have to select the server name

With the latest version of the XrmToolBox and the WebResourceManager plugin, there is now a new feature that displays a list of “unused” web resources. Well, it is in fact a list of web resource without any dependency. It does not mean that they are not used by other web resources, but it is a reduced list of web resources to analyze to check if they are still in used. Then with the “Delete selected web resources” button, you can delete web resources you don’t need anymore. Hope it will help you maintaining clean web resources list!

Today, and after a long time since the XrmToolBox was released, the Metadata Document Generator tool is now available as a plugin for the toolbox. It provides the same features than the previous stand alone version, with some extra: You can add location of attributes in forms You can select attributes NOT on forms And still: Excel or Word output (thanks to GemBox Software API) Language selection (if multi language enable on organization) Attributes selection: all attributes optionset and boolean attributes only attributes used in forms attributes not used in forms (new) attributes selected manually Attributes metadata selection Save/load settings to avoid losing time replaying the same document generation As usual the tool is available as part of the XrmToolBox application, on CodePlex