Ten Useful Features of XrmToolBox for Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM
Introduction:
XrmToolBox can be used to simplify many tasks. With so many tools now listed, a newcomer may wonder what others are using it for to maximum benefit.
XrmToolBox is a Windows application that connects to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Dynamics CRM, providing tools to ease customization and configuration tasks. It is shipped with more than 30 plugins to make administration, customization, and configuration tasks easier and less time consuming.
In this article we will explore ten of our favorite XRMToolBox tools, exploring what they do and why they are so useful.
How is it used?
Documentation is available through the wiki of XrmToolBox Github’s repository. All the information regarding the prerequisites, connection, tools description, how to use is mentioned in the documentation.
Ten useful tools of XrmToolBox:
1) Web Resource Manager
Web Resource Manager helps to manage your web resources easily. This tool has saved hours of time for creating, updating and managing the web resources of Dynamics 365/CRM. This is a must have for all developers.
2) Ribbon Workbench
The Ribbon Workbench tool helps to edit the Dynamics CRM ribbon or command bar from inside the XrmToolbox.
By installing the Ribbon Workbench you’ll quickly be performing customizations that were previously only possible by time consuming and error-prone manual editing of RibbonDiff Xml.
3) Fetch XML Builder
The tool is helpful for three major areas:
- Constructing FetchXML in ways that advanced find cannot
- Querying CRM for information not (easily) found in the CRM UI lie system and internal entities, hidden attributes or join on other fields
- Developer assistance like generating C# query expression code, OData query strings or composing queries for reports
4) Plugin Registration
The Plugin Registration tool is an important tool used for registering plugins and custom workflows.
5) Auto Number Manager
The Auto Number Manager tool’s primary goal is to give D365 customizers a way of managing auto number attributes. This feature was introduced with the 9.0 release. However, this release only supports creating and managing these attributes through the SDK. A user interface for the features is expected to be available from the 9.1 release of the platform.
With the Auto Number Manager for XrmToolBox you can create, alter and delete these attributes through an easy to use UI.
6) Site Map Editor
The Site Map Editor tool helps to manage the sitemap with no XML needed. Editing sitemap XML is scary for any developer, as any mistake in XML can make the entire CRM unusable.
This tool helps to edit your sitemap components. You can easily create areas and subareas, update the order and copy or paste components from one area to another. You can also update all the sub area details like icons or titles for multiple languages.
7) Solution Component Mover
The Solution Component Mover tool helps to transfer components from one or multiple source solutions to one target solution. It avoids components getting missed when creating a new solution or adding components from other solutions. Using this tool ensures you add all components from the selected solutions.
8) Metadata Document Generator
Metadata Document Generator makes it easier for Dynamics CRM 2011 integrators to generate documentation about entities and attributes metadata.
You’ll no longer have to write “by hand” these awful tables full of metadata information. This tool can connect to all type of Dynamics CRM 2011 deployments, including OSDP!
9) Bulk Delete tool
The Bulk Delete tool has the ability to delete records from CRM based on system views, personal views, or custom FetchXML Queries. It also has the ability to edit a FetchXML query in the FetchXML Builder tool within XrmToolBox and to select the batch size and interval (in seconds) between batches. It takes less time to delete records as compared to traditional bulk delete from CRM.
10) Metadata Browser
The Metadata Browser tool has ability to browse metadata from D365 CRM environment. This tool can be used to view all the metadata.