XRMSolutionAssistant

A .NET Standard assembly offering tooling to assist with the management of exported Microsoft CRM solution files and reducing noise in a multi-developer, branched environment.

Available Tools

• Entity OTC Aligner
• Version Reset
• Workflow Guid Aligner
• XML Sorter
• Flow Connection Mapper
• Assembly And Step Version Reset

Overview

Entity OTC Aligner

For versions of CRM < 9, each custom entity was assigned a code upon installation. Between different CRM Organizations, this value would be different. Even if sourced from the same solution. This tool allows the code to be set to a known value when extracted.

Version Reset

Many items within a CRM solution retain the version that they were initially installed with on a developer instance. To provide predictable, consistent source control files, this tool will reset this to a defined value in the Solution.xml and any other file where the <IntroducedVersion> tag is found.

Workflow Guid Aligner

Under some circumstances, the xaml for a Workflow may contain <Variable x:...> elements with Guids that are generated upon installation and therefore different every time the solution is extracted. This tool will replace those Guids with a predictable value.

XML Sorter

Due to the nature of the SolutionPackager.exe tool, nested elements may be written in an unpredictable order and create noise in source control change. This tool will alpha order those elements to maintain consistency across different extracts.

Flow Connection Mapper

Cloud Flows that are included in a solution will be extracted with connection references that are likely to be unique to the development environment. That results in the need to manually align the connections and turn on the Flows post solution import. This tool will allow you to define what the uniquename for an api connection should be and will update the customizations.xml and each Flow json to match, thereby matching connections that have been setup in the target.

Assembly And Step Version Reset

When a versioned plugin assembly is installed into a dev environment, upon solution export, every Step is updated to match that version, thereby creating diff noise. This tool will allow you to normalise to a specified version everwhere a , Version=x.x.x.x, string is found.

Usage

General

All the tools are contained in the WARP.XrmSolutionAssistant.dll which may be called from a console application.

All the tools are in the WARP.SolutionAssistant namespace.

All the tools work on a folder structure that has been created from the SolutionPackager.exe console application from the CRM SDK.

Alongside the assembly is settings.json that provides information to some of the tooling.

XRMSolutionAssistant.Console

XRMSolutionAssistant.Console is an example .NET Core console application which may be used for a quick-start and implements all the tools in the assistant assembly. The full stand-alone Windows 64-bit build is available from the releases tab here. Usage:

WARP.XRMSolutionAssistant.Console.exe /<folder>

Where folder is the path to the extracted solution file. Folder can be either a full or relative path.

To prevent a particular tool from running, locate the appsettings.json file in the same directory as the executable and edit the Excludes property which is a list of names of tools that you wish to exclude from running.

{
  "Excludes": [ "SolutionWorkflowGuidAligner", "AssemblyAndStepVersionReset" ]
}

Entity OTC Aligner

Modify your settings.json to contain a collection of EntityTypeCodes as below:

{
  "EntityTypeCodes": [
    {
      "EntityLogicalName": "warp_customentity1",
      "TypeCode": 10029
    },
    {
      "EntityLogicalName": "warp_customentity2",
      "TypeCode": 10028
    }
  ]
}

Implementation

            var entityAligner = new SolutionEntityAligner(folder);
            entityAligner.Execute();

Version Reset

Modify your settings.json SolutionVersionReset member to reflect the version you want the solution components to align to.

{
  "EntityTypeCodes": [
    {
      "EntityLogicalName": "warp_customentity",
      "TypeCode": 10145
    }
  ],
  "SolutionVersionReset": {
    "ResetVersion":  "1.0.0.0" 
  } 
}

Implementation

            var solutionVersionResetter = new SolutionVersionReset(folder);
            solutionVersionResetter.Execute();

Workflow Guid Aligner

Implementation

            var workflowGuidAligner = new SolutionWorkflowGuidAligner(folder);
            workflowGuidAligner.Execute();

XML Sorter

Implementation

            var sorter = new SolutionXmlSorter(folder);
            sorter.Execute();

Flow Connection Mapper

Modify your settings.json FlowConnectionMapper member to reflect the Connection Unique Names desired for each ApiName.

{
  "EntityTypeCodes": [
    {
      "EntityLogicalName": "warp_customentity",
      "TypeCode": 10145
    }
  ],
  "SolutionVersionReset": {
    "ResetVersion": "0.0.0.0"
  },
  "FlowConnectionMapper": {
    "ThrowExceptionOnUnmappedConnections": false,
    "Maps": [
      {
        "ApiName": "shared_sendgrid",
        "ConnectionUniqueName": "warp_sharedsendgrid_16999"
      },
      {
        "ApiName": "shared_commondataserviceforapps",
        "ConnectionUniqueName": "warp_sharedcommondataserviceforapps_397d8"
      }
    ]
  }
}

To determine ApiName, export a Flow as JSON from the development environment. Look for the connectionReferences property. That will list the connection references used in the Flow. Take the api.name property.

  "properties": {
    "connectionReferences": {
      "shared_sendgrid": {
        "runtimeSource": "embedded",
        "connection": {
          "connectionReferenceLogicalName": "warp_sharedsendgrid_70e47"
        },
        "api": {
          "name": "shared_sendgrid"
        }
      },
      "shared_commondataserviceforapps": {
        "runtimeSource": "embedded",
        "connection": {
          "connectionReferenceLogicalName": "new_sharedcommondataserviceforapps_b8dfb"
        },
        "api": {
          "name": "shared_commondataserviceforapps"
        }
      }
    },
    "definition": {...

In the above example, we have two apis that we need to map; shared_sendgrid and shared_commondataserviceforapps.

To determine the ConnectionUniqueName, log into PowerAutomate and locate the Connection References. The Name column contains the unique name of the connection. Use this value for the ConnectionUniqueName in the settings.json file. See below for example.

Set ThrowExceptionOnUnmappedConnections to true if you wish the SolutionAssistant to stop processing when an api unknown to the settings.json is found in the customizations.xml file. When set to false, a Warning is written to the Logger.

Implementation

                var flowMapper = new SolutionFlowConnectionMapper(rootDirectory);
                flowMapper.Execute();

Assembly And Step Version Reset

Modify your settings.json AssemblyAndStepVersionReset member to reflect the version you want your assemblies and steps to be.

{
  "EntityTypeCodes": [
    {
      "EntityLogicalName": "warp_customentity",
      "TypeCode": 10145
    }
  ],
  "SolutionVersionReset": {
    "ResetVersion": "0.0.0.0"
  },
  "AssemblyAndStepVersionReset": {
    "ResetVersion":  "1.0.0.0"
  }
}

Implementation

                var assemblyVersionReset = new AssemblyAndStepVersionReset(rootDirectory);
                assemblyVersionReset.Execute();

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