I recently got a suggestion from a user of Universal Search in XrmToolBox to include an export to Excel function in the app to make finding results within the search results easier. Universal search is great for finding values in Dataverse tables and in Dataverse Metadata, but limiting the output results to the app itself, doesn’t allow for additional reporting, searching or manipulation of the results.
The first tool I thought of as an example of this type of functionality, was FetchXml Builder, by Jonas Rapp. in FetchXml Builder you can open the results of a query in Excel after getting the results.
This is similar to my user’s requirement, so I was able to reuse some code from Jonas’ GitHub repository to make the implementation easy. The only real difference is that Universal Search outputs multiple tabs of results and includes highlighting of the results.
Within a couple of hours, I was done, thanks to the open-source community. The final result allows you to export the results from Universal Search without the need to copy and paste each tab as you would have had to do before.
I would love to know how people are using Universal Search in the wild and I’m always open to suggestions for improvements. So, feel free to drop me a line or add a rating / comment in XrmToolBox like Vijaya did.
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