Search Your Metadata with Universal Search!

Universal Search is a free and open source XrmToolBox tool that I released earlier this year that allows you to search all records in Dynamics 365 / CDS using plain text and wildcards to find instances of any data in your system that contain the specified text.

Several months ago after releasing the last feature I’d hoped to include in the tool, the ability to search on related lookups and picklists, I polled the community on what feature I should implement next. The overwhelming majority asked for metadata search.

Okay. Well only 3 people replied, but like Dentists and toothpaste 2 out of 3 is still an majority. So here it is! You can now perform plain text searches of your metadata using Universal Search in XrmToolBox.

I had a specific use case for this functionality just this week.

I was trying to delete an entity from an environment and kept getting the dreaded dependencies error. While there is an awesome tool in the XrmToolBox to view relationships from Jonas Rapp (https://github.com/rappen/RelatedRecordsAnalyzer), the tool doesn’t go as far as letting you know if, for example, you have a subgrid somewhere on a form that references your entity or if you’ve included a field from that entity in a view.

With the Metadata search capabilities in Universal Search you can go deeper into the Metadata in D365/CDS and see every instance of a reference to a specific entity, attribute or relationship anywhere in the system.

The search functionality works exactly the same in Universal Search whether your searching for records or metadata. You can use wildcard * characters to search for text within the metadata or without the wildcard to search for exact text. You can also double click a row in the results to go directly to the customization area to view the metadata. There are also options for what to search when performing a metadata search including Entity, Attributes, Relationships, Forms and Views and you can perform a case sensitive or insensitive search.

If you have ideas or feedback for Universal Search. Please feel free to contribute to this and other Open Source XrmToolBox tools on Github