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MSCRM Development Tips & Tricks #2 – Metadata Browser

Throughout your CRM development process, there are numerous times where you need to quickly find out a list of attributes for particular entity, inspect their relationships or check if the fields are valid for creation / update / delete. Yes, you can achieve this by going to Customization tab – Customize Entities and select the entities you want.

But this is just way too many clicks if I want to quickly find out these sort of information. This is where the Metadata Browser comes in handy. To open this Metadata Browser, you can just browse to http://[crmserver]:[portno]/[orgname]/sdk/list.aspx in your favorite browser.

You will see a list of entities and their relevant description as per the picture below.

To see the list of attributes and relationships, click on the Definition icon for a particular entity. On this screen, you can inspect a number of things such as the attribute list, its type, length, valid for advanced find, valid for form, whether the field is a required field or not, relationships, etc.

Hopefully this simple trick can save you enormous time in your development.