Here comes a requested add-in for ouputting all your Microsoft CRM Customizations to a Word document. This add-in can be used for various scenarios, Documentation Document your work after it's finished, removing any possible mismatch from the specifications. Understand the work of others when taking ownership of a CRM instance without any documentations provided (Using the filters to export only Custom Entities, Attributes and Relationships) Presents all your ISV Configuration changes in one place, that usually are hard to get a good overview of.

Daily work routines

• Development Aid, use a complete export document as a reference.
  By searching in the document for a specific entity you can quickly see available picklist values, implemented javascript, published attributes on form and attributes schema name including data type restrictions.
• Architect Aid, Cut & Paste attribute, forms or relationships Tables to your specifications, and extend them with new values or describe changes.

The Add-in supports multi-language CRM installations, you select the prefered output language, and the base language will be used as fallback. You can also define to only export custom entities, attributes and relationsships making the document easier to read. The document can contain following chapters, Organisation Settings Configurations set for the selected organisation (tenant) i e Schema Name Prefix.. ISV Configuration All custom Menues, Navigation Items, Toolbar Buttons and Renamed titles Workflows Security Roles Entities Attributes Forms JavaScript inc. dependencies Relationships Checkout sample document, CCM Word Sample.docx (41,74 kb) Only $149 Free version upgrades Requirements Docx File Format Viewer Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or newer

First of all, I would like to thank for all the positive response regarding CRM Configuration Manager, always a joy to hear that the product works :)

Here comes a new release of CRM Configuration Manager that contains some improvements and a new Extension Framework for creating Add-ins. The first extension interface available is for output handling. You can now implement a new document type handler for exporting. Could be used for various documentation formats, for example an Visio document handler, that would create a data model of the exported entities and their relationships.

A SDK will be released in the near future, but until then you can contact me for guidance.

Improvements and bugfixes included in version 1.50,

Improved 'Export only Modifications' function, now also checking modifications at Entity Forms and Relationships Not all system entities was listed in the Entity view. Thanks to Daniel Jansen for reporting the issue. Implemented Add-in framework for output document formats.  Revised user interface to improve usability Minor bug fixes Complete list of features CcmSetup1.55.exe (966,81 kb) Also released an output Add-in for Microsoft Word document format, read more about it here. Happy Customization!

There was a little bug / oversight in CRM Configuration Manager when working with CRM installations with other languages then English. Non-Latin characters didn't get saved correctly due incorrect encoding. It has now been resolved by checking what languages are installed at the server.

The fix is included in v1.15

Thanks to Daniel Sabater for reporting the issue.

This is a follow up on my earlier project CRM Customization Manager, CRM Configuration Manager is a Windows application to create an Export / Import selection that can later be exported as a command prompt string for later use, or execute directly inside the application. The main features of CRM Configuration Manager are,

• Easy access to the features of CRM Customization Manager
• Possible to select a CRM server as destination, allowing one click export and import.
• Create advance export/import selections for later use inside scripts / installations

This release includes CRM Customization Manager v2.0 that contains fixes and few new features,

• JavaScript Export/Import, This allows you to extract JavaScript to a local folder, where you can work in a proper script editor, and later import them back. You can also create new javascripts in the same folder, just follow the name convention and they will also be imported to the correct entity / event.
• Zip support, Now all features works with zipped customizations
• Include Related Entities, This features will automatically include related entities to the selected entities, so their relationships are exported and can be reviewed for conflicts. This is recommended during the development process when relationships may change.
• Publish Workflows, Publish operation now also publishes workflows

v1.0 key features...

I’m wondering, is there any interest in creating your own operations? That is, using a Plug-in model to add custom arguments to the application that will call your code before/after execution. If you find the application useful, please donate to keep the development alive :)   [Update 2010-05-18] Version 1.5 Released, read more about it here Get CCM v1.50 Happy Customizing!

If one would like to change a relationship lookup field name on a entity, then it is important to change the name of the relationship.

For example, We have an entity called “EntityA” and it has a N:1 relationship with “EntityB”, the lookup attribute is currently called “entityb_conntectedid” and we would like to change the lookup attribute to “entitybid”. Then you normally would remove the relation, and add a new one setting the new name “entityid” to the lookup attribute.

Then you have to change the “relationship name” from the generated name “new_new_entitya_new_entityb” to for example “new_new_entitya_new_entityb2”. Otherwise there will be a conflict when importing the customizations to a CRM system that contains the old attribute making it impossible to publishing the entity if the old field exists on a form.

In the upcoming version of CRM Customization Manager (v2.0) I’ve included a warning message if one tries to import a customization that has a different name of the lookup to the same relationship so one can spot this before CRM gets broken. Also if the relationship is exported CRM Customization Manager solves the problem.

If you already have imported the new relationship and cannot publish / import the Entity, you can fix it by editing the CRM database. Access the table “OrganizationUIBase”, filter it by the ObjectTypeCode of your custom entity, then removing all the references to the old attribute in the “FormXml” column.

Related errors:
Cannot Export Customizations From Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Update:
CRM Configuration Manager now handles this.

Generics is a very nice feature of C# language, and can be used to simplify the CRM Web Service method calls. One of my responsibilities at Logica is to develop a framework for CRM development, and one of the main classes in this framework is called CrmSystem, it wraps the CrmService methods among other things. Using generics one can then type,

account acc = CrmSystem.Retrieve<account>(myAccountId);

also we use a special NameValue class CrmConditions to one of our Execute overloads, here is how it can look

List<account> acc = CrmSystem.Execute<account>(new CrmCondition("emailaddress1", "daniel@logica.com"));

This would retrieve all accounts that got the email "daniel@logica.com"

Here is one of the overloads for the Retrive Method that uses Generics, it calls an other overload that does the actual call to CRM Web Service using the EntityName string that we get thru typeof(T).Name

public T Retrieve<T>(Guid id, params string[] columnSet) where T : BusinessEntity { 
     return (T)Retrieve(typeof(T).Name, id, new ColumnSet(columnSet));
}

Hope this gives some inspiration for your own CrmApi wrappers :)

When registering plug-ins, CRM doesn't always look for referenced assemblies where you think it would. It can look for "some" dll's in CRMWeb\bin folder (but not all references for some reason) as Gustaf explained in his blog.

But there is one more deviation, and that is when registering Workflow plugins, CRM looks for referenced dlls in "x:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\Server\bin", and not the "assembly" folder where you put your Plug-in assembly. 

Recently I was working on a dynamic Fetch XML query that was adding a lot of conditions. During a batch run the CRM Service started to crash when the xml size got around ~135kb. My first thought was that there were a size limit of the SOAP message that we'd cross, but after further testing it would become evident that fetch queries has a limit of 2097 <condition> elements. That is 2097 per <filer> element. If a query has linked entities that has 0-2097 conditions then the main entity can have a maximum of 2095 conditions.

I've lately changed focus from MOSS 2007 to work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions, anyhow. As Microsoft doesn't use the .NET 3.5 web extensions AJAX functionalities in CRM 4, and that is something that you may like to use in your ISV solutions, you need to change the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\CRMWeb\web.config" to include all the references to the .NET 3.5 libraries. As you may know changing the web.config is not a supported customization, as after an upgrade your changes won't be there. So I have a plan of writing a small consoleapp that will add the changes to the web.config but until then here is a web.config with them included.