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When I first released Universal Search there were a few search scenarios I didn’t address. In particular, you couldn’t search for records based on the human readable value of picklist and lookup fields. Thanks to @AidenKaskela for submitting an issue to track this deficiency.

So What?

If you don’t know what the above means read on. If you do then skip to the next paragraph.

Essentially, picklist values and lookup values are stored as their unique value in the database (integers and guids). Meaning by default when you save a picklist or lookup value the value in the database isn’t what you see on the form. Behind the scenes and picklist is stored as a number (1,2, 600000 or something else) and a lookup is stored as a globally unique identifier (GUID e.g. 6f9efa49-ca0a-4f7a-9f69-f6574194b397) to ensure that these values are unique. When searching for this data you need to query the value and then cross reference that value with the picklist text in the metadata or with the actual records associated with the lookup.

Yep, it can do that now.

In the most recent version of Universal Search for XrmToolBox you can now search both the unique identifier OR the text value that you would see on the form or in a search (e.g. Advanced Find or View) in Dynamics.

Two new options have been added to the Universal Search form.

1. Search Picklist Text (Slower) – Search for specific text in a Picklist / OptionSet field.
2. Search Lookup Text (Slowest) – Search for specific text in a Lookup field.

So, Why The Slow Down?

With a Picklist or a Lookup search, the values are buried beneath what you normally see on the front end. As a result, there’s additional requests that need to be made in order to get at these values. Universal Search is the most thorough search of the data in Dynamics / CDS there is, which means there will be bottlenecks, but our goal is that no record in Dynamics will be left undiscovered. Give it a try. If you can break it…or find something it can’t find, I owe you a beer…and you can report it on Github ( https://github.com/mikefactorial/MikeFactorial.XTB.Plugins.UniversalSearch/issues). Cheers!

What Else is New?

There are some additional updates this version as well. The following is the full list of updates in version 1.1.0 and 1.1.1

1.1.0
1. This version includes the ability to search for records based on lookup names and picklist names as well as improvements to date/time searching. 2. A fix for connecting using oAuth with a card reader for authentication has also been included in this release.
3. An update to more reliably search Date/Time fields was included in this release.

1.1.1
Includes a fix for entities with non-searchable primary name attributes to allow searching of those attributes.