CRM Configuration Manager Help

CRM Configuration Manager is an application for working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customizations. The primary functions is to export and import customizations the best way possible, fixing issues that exists in the standard process provided by Microsoft. Also one goal with CCM is to be able to automate the customization handling process, i e for use with version control and installations scripts.

Here we describe how to use CRM Configuration Manager, step by step. CCM is built upon one main dialog, that contains all input parameters. This gives a powerful user interface, but can also feel a bit complicated at first. The whole setup process consists of six steps, we will explain them bellow with an image illustrating where in the dialog the action is performed.

This is the main dialog, all actions are done in a top to bottom fashion, where you start at the top and drill down the options until you have a valid selection to execute.

1. Operation, Here you selected what operation you want to perform,
   • Export, Operation to extract customizations from a CRM server to a destination file or CRM server.
   • Import, Operation to import customizations to a CRM server
   • Import & Publish, Operation to import customization, and publish the imported customization on the destination CRM Server.
2. Source, Here you select the source of the data that should be exported or imported
   • CRM, Shown when Exporting, The CRM Server that should be used to extract customizations from.
   • File, Shown when Importing, The customizations file (zip or xml) that contains customizations to be imported.
   • JavaScript, Shown when Importing, A folder to a JavaScript directory, the javascript files should use naming convention as follows, "[entity].[attribute]-[event].js"
3. Destination, This is the destination of the selected operation
   • CRM, Select a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Server for Export or Import operation.
   • File, Select a Zip or XML file where all the customization will be exported to.
   • Custom, Here you could add your own destination file formats using CCM Add-in Framework.
     • Available Add-ins:
       • Microsoft Word.
4. Options, Options for the selected operation.
   • Include Related Entities, This will also include entities that have relations to the selected entities.
   • Extract JavaScript, Save JavaScripts to a destination folder.
   • Export only Modifications, Use a previously exported customization file to compare with and only export modified entities.
   • Silent, Only applied in console application, no output text will be shown.
   • Remove Deleted Attributes, Removes all attributes in the destination CRM server that does not exists in the source customization.
   • No Prompting, No prompting will occur, all confirmation dialogs will be automatically accepted. Recommended in scripts.
5. Selections, After selecting a valid source and destination for an operation, the view for selection will be loaded with nodes that are available for the selected operation.
6. Execute, This starts the execution of the operation. When finished the data should have been transfered from the source to destination with the selected transformations.