One big issue when editing a large and complex Flow is not having an expand all button to save you having to click on each of your actions, one by one.
This Bookmark-let will allow you to expand all the Actions of a Flow with the click of a button.
Simply drag the below button onto your Bookmarks Bar within Chrome or Firefox, and then when your viewing a Flow, click it to Expand all the Actions in one go.
I have started collating my Bookmark-lets in one page. These are handy buttons you can drag on to your browsers Bookmark Bar, and can be used in certain Dynamics 365/Power Apps pages.
We have all been there. Something has gone wrong, and you find that you now have a backlog of running Flows, that have all stalled, or waiting for resources, and it seems like its the end of the world.
You think to yourself, well, that’s okay, I’ll just Turn Off the Flow, and all will sort itself out. If only turning it off would help. It turns out, simply turning off the Flow does nothing to all of the current running Flows that are sat in the queue.
Okay then, well, how about I just bulk cancel all of the Flows. Oh, wait a minute. Microsoft only lets you cancel them one at a time. Okay, well, I’ll just go through them one at a time, and cancel them. Oh, wait, there’s pages and pages and pages of Flows sat there. Hundreds maybe, but I haven’t got time to keep clicking the “See More” button to find out how many there are.
I had this issue recently, and it seems, other than deleting the Flow, and re-importing it, there is not a lot you can do about it. Well, I would like to introduce a nice little Bookmark-let that you can drag into your Google Chrome’s (or Firefox and the new Edge) Bookmarks Bar, and use it on the appropriate screen, and it will automate the job for you. Be warned, it will still take its time to run, as all it does is simulate a user clicking on the Flow, choosing Cancel etc. etc.
Simply drag the bookmark button below up to your Bookmarks Bar. This will create a nice little button for you to click on. If you navigate to your offending Flow, and click the All Runs option, and then filter it to show currently Running Flows, and click the button, it will one by one, cancel all of the Flows for you.
Drag the below button up to your bookmarks bar now.
I recently had a requirement to perform some Data Migration, but I needed a test system while I built up my SSIS process as I didn’t want to use the real online environments. Luckily, I have my own on-premise Dynamics 365 Version 9 Server which I have always used for testing and messing around with solutions and compatibility.
The main issue I have always had with using on-premise servers however is that these days, we are all developing with online environments, and solutions and what not from online cannot be imported into an on-premise environment. In the past, I have often just resorted to hand modifying solutions to get them in to the system. This would often involve editing the solution.xml file within the solution zip file, to alter the version tags at the top, and to remove the crmonline tag. Quite often, this would also require a few modifications to the customizations.xml file to remove any tags that do not exist in version 9 of Dynamics.
Its a hack, but for testing purposes, this was always something that worked.
These days though, you more often than not will face all manor of other issues, such as dependencies on other solutions, and its become a lot harder to achieve this.
I have recently updated my Visual Studio Template for holding Microsoft Dynamics Assets. Its available on the Marketplace by searching for Hallstudios, or you can download it using the button below.
I have added a new Project within the Solution Template for holding TypeScript files for use in the Entity Forms. Creating and editing a TypeScript file will automatically create a matching JavaScript file which can be uploaded to Dynamics.
The solution also includes Intellisense for the Xrm Client API within the TypeScript files.
The Solution Unpacker tool has been updated with the latest version so it now supports packing and unpacking Dynamics Solutions that contain Flow’s.
Just recently updated the CRM utilities extension with the following fixes :
Supports SVG files correctly. Although publishing files to an SVG Web Resource was working, if a file in Visual Studio had the SVG extension, when right clicking it, it would not offer the option to Link or Publish.
When extracting a solution from Dynamics, if the Web Resource naming convention does not have a file extension, then the Publish and Linking features would not work properly. Now, if it detects that the file has a corresponding “filename.data.xml” file (which it will if its been exported and unpacked from Dynamics), then it will offer the Publish and Linking options.
When trying to link or publish a TypeScript file, if an equivalent JavaScript file exists in either the same folder, or in an alternative JS folder, then its that file that will get linked or published. This means you can directly edit a TS file, save it and publish, without having to select the JS file.
An Entity Filter has been added to the Class Generation options allowing a list of entity logical names (separated by a semi-colon) to be entered. When creating a class file, any entities that are found in this list are not added to the file. This is very useful when you have a similar named custom entity that always clashes with a system entity. For example, if you have your own address entity, you can exclude the system address entity.
As usual, you can get the update from the Marketplace, or by downloading here :
How did I not know about this. After all this time, using the Dynamics Web Interface, or XrmToolbox to explore standard attributes and entities, I found this. Very useful indeed.
I recently wanted to try out Visual Studio 2019 with the SSIS Package designer (and to also try out the KingswaySoft extensions for dealing with Dynamics 365 data integration/migrations. Getting it all to work turned out to be a little bit of a challenge, so here I am documenting the issues I encountered, and what I did to fix it.
I have just updated the CRM Utilities for Visual Studio package to work with Visual Studio 2019 as well. The version is now at 3.6.2 and is ready to download from the Marketplace.
Just search for James Hall on the extensions window of Visual Studio or visit the marketplace.
I have decided to release a small utility that I have been working on to assist me in my day to day work with Dynamics CRM. A common requirement in the standard Development, Test, Train and Production environment setup is the moving of solutions between organisations, and version numbering. One thing I often need to do is to check the version numbers of a solution across different CRM instances, to see if there are any discrepancies.
I needed a tool that could just do it for me with a click of a button and highlight any differences.
And so, here it is.
The application can simply be configured to connect to any number of CRM environments (within reason) and it will detect all of the solutions installed, and their version numbers, and show them in a grid. Any instances where an environment does not have the same version number, the solution is highlighted.
To configure it, simply click the Settings button, and then the Connections button to add your connections. On the settings screen, you can enable and disable the connections you wish to view. It should be fairly straight forward.
I shall probably be adding more features to it as I go, but for the first version, its already proving very useful to me, so thought I would share it.
If you wish to Download it, you can download the Zip file, extract it and run it.
Downloadable version of Dynamics Solution Dashboard
