Are you a Power Platform or Dynamics 365 CE Developer, you would definitely need to work on Plugin Registration tool at any given point of time and having a local application for Plugin Registration tool greatly helps…in this post, I will show a little different way to install Plugin registration tool and that too very easily.
Well, this approach is especially useful to me when I got a new laptop and need to work on Plugin Registration Tool where the Plugins already build for the implementation.
First 3 ways might have known to everyone through which you can download Plugin registration tool…do you know there is fourth approach as well…
Because there were limitations to use these approaches at least in my experience, I found the fourth one very useful.
XrmToolBox – Not quite convenient to profile and debug your plugins
https://xrm.tools/SDK – Dlls in the downloaded folder will be blocked and would need to manually unblock the DLL’s for the Tool to work properly
CLI – People rarely use this.
Just do note that the approach is very easy and works only if you have a Plugin Project already. Please follow the steps below
Just open the Plugin project.
Right click on the solution and choose manage Nuget Packages for the solution
Search for Plugin Registration tool as below
4. Choose the Plugin project and click install, confirm the prompt and agree the license agreement shown
5. Once installed, next go to the Project folder in the local machine.
6. Navigate to Packages folder, you should see a folder for Plugin Registration tool below
7. There you go, you can open the Plugin Registration Application under tools folder. You can undo the changes for the Assembly it is linked to Source control.
That’s it, how easy it was? Hope this would help someone.
This post is for all who are working on D365 Model Driven Apps and mainly Plugins.
Yes, you saw it right, in this blog post, we will see how can debug plugin without using our favorite plugin profiler which is very widely used from quite some time by everyone working on Plugins for Dynamics 365. All this is done by a tool called Dataverse Browser, which is not yet on XrmToolBox. Please note that there were some limitations as detailed in limitation section below.
Here are 3 simple steps to follow..
Install Dataverse Browser
Attach the Debugger
Run your actual operation.
Step into your code and debug it.
The tool embeds a web browser based on Chromium. It works by translating the Web API requests to SDK requests. Then it analyzes if plugin steps are registered on the message and it loads them, make them run locally. All other requests are sent to the Dataverse, so that the plugins are interacting with the real database.
Download the latest source code of Dataverse browser here.
Next extract the zip file downloaded as highlighted below
Extract the zip file downloaded, open Dataverse.Browser Application as highlighted below.
In the popup window, click on More info as highlighted below…
Then run the application anyway…you will be presented with a window where you can select the environment. Going forward, any time you want to open Dataverse browser, just open the Dataverse.Browser.exe and choose the environment as below.
Click on New, enter the details as above and key in the details.
Enter the settings of your environment:
A name meaningful for you
The host name of your instance (without the https://)
The path to the plugins assembly file (the dll). For a better experience, it should be compiled in debug mode with the pdb file generated.
Then click Go.
You just need to Authenticate to your instance.
Once Authenticated to the respective model driven apps, all the Web API requests sent to Dataverse will be shown as below.
I have following Plugin Libraries registered.
Next step is to choose the instance and perform the respective operation which triggers the Plugin. So, in here, I will perform an update to the Account entity from the Dataverse Browser which triggers the Plugin.
Once an update is performed, a Web API request gets recorded in the Dataverse browser as highlighted below.
Since the Plugin is in Post Operation, i.e. Stage number is 40
Just expand the Patch Request, you should see two operations on 30, 40, but area of interest here is for the Plugin which was registered on stage 40.
Make sure you open the Visual Studio and perform the below steps from Dataverse Browser.
Attach the debugger from Dataverse Browser by clicking on the Plug Symbol as below which will show the list of debugger options available for you to select from. Here I have selected Execute Plugins, plugin will be invoked. You can either select any of the three options as presented below.
1.Do not execute plugins – recommended when you want to debug without actually triggering your plugin logic. i.e. With this approach even you can check the code in Production environment.
2. Execute plugins/Execute plugins with auto break – recommended when you want to debug by triggering your actual plugin, this is recommended in case your plugin code had changed recently and in Development environments.
Just select Ecellors Demo – Microsoft Visual Studio: Visual Studio Professional 2022 version which will launch an existing Visual studio 2022 as below in break mode. Next click on Continue as highlighted below or press Click F5 on your keyboard.
This shows you that the debugger has been attached when you navigate to Dataverse Browser asking you to place your breakpoints.
Now just place breakpoints in your code in Visual Studio. Just go back to Dataverse Browser and click on Ok on the Diaglog box.
Perform the operation which triggers the Plugin from Dataverse Browser itself, this will hit the break point in Visual Studio from where you can debug your plugin.
As you might have observed, your code need not throw exception in order to debug, you could do similarly to the way you would debug using Profiler. But here just that you don’t need to deploy the latest code to the Dataverse just for debugging purpose.
This gives a lot more flexibility eases the way you debug plugins.
Limitions:
There is no support for transactions.
When plugins are triggered because of a server-side operation, they will not be run locally.
For many reasons, behavior will never be perfectly similar to the one when plugins are executed on server side.
Happy debugging, I hope you found this post useful…
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