November 2016 – ECELLORS CRM Blog

So today, I would like to give you a list of most useful tools available till now for Dynamics CRM which increases the developer productivity and helps Admins.

Some great tools you should check out to see if they could work in your organization.

Fiddler – web debugging proxy
Task Workflow Tools – custom workflow steps to extend your workflows
Mobile Task Flows – walk users through tasks in the mobile or phone app
Ribbon Workbench – visually edit the ribbon
CRM Bookmarklets – JavaScript saved as bookmarks to “hack” your CRM (edit read only fields, show hidden fields, etc.)
XRM Toolbox – It was shipped with 20 84 plugins as of April 2018 to handle several administration, customization or configuration tasks. Wiki
- Access Checker
- Assembly Recovery Tool
- Attribute Bulk Updater
- Audit Center
- FetchXml Tester
- Bulk Form Attribute Manager
- FLS Bulk Updater
- Form Libraries Manager
- Form Parameter Manager
- Import/Export NN relationships
- Iconator
- Metadata Browser
- Metadata Document Generator
- Privileges Discovery
- Role Updater
- Script Finder
- SiteMap Editor
- Solution Components Mover
- Solution Import
- Solution Transfer Tool
- Sync Filter Manager
- Synchronous events execution order editor
- Easy Translator
- User Roles Manager
- User Settings Utility
- View Layout Replicator
- View Transfer Tool
- Web Resources Manager
Metablast – visual utility for exporting metadata
CRM Snoop – Plugin Troubleshooting tool
LinqPad – Easily run .NET code
CRM DevTools – Chrome extension visible in the F12 developer area with lots of helpful functions for admins. It is worth it just to remember the debug and diagnostic links
KingswaySoft – SSIS Integration toolkit
Developer tool kit – New developer tool kit which was officially released
Microsoft Fakes framework to unit test your CRM Code – Test your undeveloped CRM Custom code using Microsoft Fakes framework
CRM JavaScript Web API Service Utility – Used to write the latest javascript code using Web API
Link Buddy – It’s useful for converting logging/tracing details from CRM plug-ins, custom apps, etc. into click-able links that open the CRM record for which the GUID represents.
MS CRM Security Roles to Excel Export – A Tool to export CRM Security roles into a Excel workbook.
FetchXML Tester Online – Allows you to test FetchXML queries online without importing any solution or downloading any separate application.
ILMerge – a .NET tool/utility which merges a number of dll’s into one dll, which is useful for creating plugins for online CRM.
Tool to track performance – Check the CRM latency and bandwidth at https://CRMUrl.com/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx (make sure to replace CRMUrl.com with the actual CRM URL).
Convert FetchXML to SQL query – people find difficulties in converting the fetch xml query created from advanced find to a SQL query to retrieve records from Backend, use this tool to help the same
Convert SQL query to Fetch XML – Two way round, use this to convert your backend queries to fetch XML to use them in your Code to retrieve data and metadata.
Diagnostics Tool for On premise – Helps CRM developers and administrators to enable trace and devErrors on CRM server. Whereas its name only mentions CRM 2011, it is compatible with CRM 2013 and 2015 too (OnPremise only)
Fetch XML Formatter 1, Fetch XML Formatter 2– Two similar tools for the same functionality, use according to your convenience. These were lightweight windows application that tool will be help you when you are extensively working with FetchXML in Javascript / C# code to get desired result. Takes fetchXML from Advance Find as an input and convert that into desired format, which can be used into Javascript / C# for further coding.
Local option set to Global optionset converter – It’s purpose is to automate the task of converting a Local Option Set (an option set that is defined by and specific to a single entity. e.g. a CRM 4.0 Picklist), into a Global Option Set.
Win Merge – A great tool to compare customizations.xml files taken from solutions
CRM Rest Builder – A tool for CRM 2011/2013/2015/2016 Online & On Premise to generate JavaScript code using the 2011 & Web API REST endpoints.
CRM Visual Studio Code JS Snippets – JavaScript code snippets for Dynamics 365/CRM 2011 – 2016 (5.0 – 8.2)
TableTools2 – Add on for only Mozilla firefox to improve the CRM Grids. You can use the addon in grids that don’t display a filter or just in general with any page that displays a table like structure.
CRM Theme Generator – Use this tool to generate the feature and create themes in CRM, supporting latest versions
Advanced Query outer Join – Plugin to enable outer join queries from Advanced Find. This plugin enabled you to do that. The plugin runs on pre-RetrieveMultiple and alter the query that gets sent to the pipeline, with the correct outer join conditions
Easy VS Code in Action – Use this to work with JavaScript file types from your desktop itself and without opening visual studio
Custom code validation tool – Between CRM 2015 and CRM 2016 there are no differences for the checking of unsupported customizations of Js code, so if you get results to fix with the 2015 custom code validation tool means that you need to fix as well for 2016
CRM DevTools – from Sonoma Partners is a Chrome extension which quickly provides CRM record and environment information and makes troubleshooting and testing so much easier. Once it’s installed, you can access the features by going to the Chrome DevTools (F12 key) and clicking the CRM DevTools tab.
Solution to Create “Does Not Have” Queries using Advanced Find – This solution allows you to create “does not have” or “does not exist” queries using the standard Advanced Find interface.
Dynamics 365 developer extensions(tool kit) – Tool to search for CRM related MSDN content, and tooling to assist with managing and deploying web resources, plug-ins, and reports
Network Visualisation tool – Visualize the relationships between accounts, contacts and activities in a network graph, refer to this video to get insights
Level up for dynamics CRM – Works with Edge and Chrome only. Gives form helpers and Navigation helpers, an amazing tool
Personal view to System view – use this to convert created personal view to system view
Beautify your JS, JSON code – improve the readability of your JS code, even minify your code
Ribbon workbench 2016 – Most user friendly and universally accepted tool to customize ribbon, note that this version don’t need Silverlight within your browser
ilspy – Used to decompile your source code from your .NET DLL, helpful to find your source code from plugin DLL’s
Autonumbering solution – free autonumbering solution used to generate a Unique Reference Number for new records so they can easily be tracked, and is also useful for integrations.
ReSharper – on the fly code analysis, identifies problems and provides quick fixes, best addin to visual studio
Integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Find the ETL tools and other key useful integration tools supported from MSDN.
Call workflows and actions using Javascript – Use this tool to call workflows and actions using JavaScript without much hassles without too much taking care of code.
Scribe Insights – Good data migration platform to move data between two systems and create new records in MS CRM. Reasonably the best in terms of performance with such a kind of UI and easy to learn. Comes with one month free trial.
CRM Maintenance Job Editor – Used to reschedule jobs that have caused performance issues in the CRM, it would also allow you to schedule the recurrence pattern of the Jobs to be executed during the day
SOAP UI – Most widely used tool for testing web services and other API’s without much hassles.
DLL Extractor – Extract your plugin DLL’s located on your CRM Database, this applies only for On premise applications. Login to your Client network and specify the server and database name with Integrated security or SQL Authentication. Click on List Plugins which shows the assemblies registered and download the required ones.
Portal Checker – Troubleshoot your Dynamics 365 portals
Autonumber No Code solution – Autonumbering generation solution.
Commander – is a pre-configured software package that provides you with an awesome terminal emulator, and best shell you’ll ever have on Windows
GuidGen – GuidGen is Microsoft recommended tool which programmatically generates GUID’s.

Hope you found some tool which had increased your productivity developing CRM…

Cheers,

PMDY

Retrieving metadata items by name is generally easier because you probably already have some reference to this item name in your code. The following table lists the alternate key properties for retrieving metadata items by name. The primary benefit of this feature is to provide an alternative way to identify a CRM record.

Traditionally we use CRM entity’s primary key field to identify a CRM record, which stores GUID values and this becomes a challenge when we try to integrate CRM data with third-party database or application systems, which might use some natural keys to identify a record. It provides much easier way to code while integrating with 3rd party systems.

Metadata item	Alternate Key	Example
Entity	LogicalName	GET /api/data/v8.2/EntityDefinitions(LogicalName=’account’)
Attribute	LogicalName	GET /api/data/v8.2/EntityDefinitions(LogicalName=’account’)/Attributes(LogicalName=’emailaddress1′)
Relationship	SchemaName	GET /api/data/v8.2/RelationshipDefinitions(SchemaName=’Account_Tasks’)
Global Option Set	Name	GET /api/data/v8.2/GlobalOptionSetDefinitions(Name=’metric_goaltype’)

When creating an alternative key, CRM kicks off a system job that creates a db index at CRM database server side, the purpose of the db index is to enforce the uniqueness of key while offering an optimal query performance. Depending on the number of existing CRM records that you have for the concerned entity in CRM system, it could take a while to create the index. You can see the most recent status of the index creating job. Only the below three fields could be created as keys and over all we can create 5 keys for an entity.

String
Integer
Decimal

Alternate keys could be used in the two scenarios as below

Update
Upsert (a new capability introduced in CRM 2015 Spring release, which will be further discussed in a following post)

Let us see performing an update operation through code with alternate keys

using (var service = new OrganizationService(crmConnection))

{

// Use alternate key (accountnumber) field to identify an account record

Entity account = new Entity(“account”, “accountnumber”, “ACT-12345”);

// Set new credit limit;

account[“creditlimit”] = new Money(100000);

// Entity reference using alternate key (emailaddress1) on contact entity

account[“primarycontactid”] = new EntityReference(“contact”, “emailaddress1”, “joe@duo.com”);

UpdateRequest request = new UpdateRequest() { Target = account };

UpdateResponse response = (UpdateResponse)service.Execute(request);

}

In the case that a CRM record cannot be found using the provided key value, you will receive the following error exception (where account is the entity name).

References: Alternate keys from MSDN

Cheers,

PMDY

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Month: November 2016

Open source tools, Solutions available for Developers and Admins

All about alternate keys in Dynamics CRM

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