Note: I originally posted this at cobalt.net

At CRMUG Summit I sat in on a session with other developers discussing their favorite troubleshooting tools. They were all really cool, but I found one particularly useful since then and wanted to share my experiences with it. CRM DevTools from Sonoma Partners is a Chrome extension which quickly provides CRM record and environment information and makes troubleshooting and testing so much easier for me. In this post I’m going to share how I use this tool to be more effective in my role as a developer working with CRM.

Getting Started

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM DevTools extension is available from the Chrome web store and installs in seconds. Once it’s installed, you can access the features by going to the Chrome DevTools (F12 key) and clicking the CRM DevTools tab.

Quicker Access to Information with Forms Tab

If you’re looking at the DevTools from a record then the first tab you see has lots of helpful information for that particular record. Back when we were using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 you could get the entity ID and type code from the URL, but with 2013 and beyond, Microsoft has made that information a lot harder to get at. This section shows you the schema name of the entity, the ID of the particular record, the object/entity type code, and the type of form you’re currently looking at. When I’m trying to troubleshoot code that’s failing with a particular record, getting quick access to the ID is invaluable.

The action buttons on this form are really great to:

– Show Schema Name and Show Labels are a way to toggle the labels on fields, so you don’t have to open the form customizations to see what field is in the schema.

– Enable Form sets and disabled fields to Enabled so you can manually correct data that may have been set wrong through some process.

– Show Hidden Fields does what its name implies. This is really helpful when I troubleshoot JavaScript that references hidden fields and I want to see what’s happening with them. Of course you can set them to visible through the customizations, but now there’s no need to go through all those extra steps.

Enhanced options in Find Tab

The Find tab has options to make it easier to find certain records or other information not related to the record you’re on.

Some of the options available here are:

– Open Advanced Find: This is awesome to have with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, when the advanced find could be painful to find.

– Open Record: if you have a record ID then you just have to select the entity name from the drop down, give the ID, and the record opens for you. I don’t use it that much, but I could see it being helpful in some circumstances.

– Find Type Code: A simple way to get the object type code given the name of an entity. I would prefer if it was a drop down of existing entities like the line above it, but it still gets the job done.

– Find Attribute: This drop down has a list of all the fields on the form and sets your focus on the one you pick. This could be helpful if you have a very large form, but I tend to use the built in Find through the browser.

Fetch – An Awesome Execution Area

Hands-down my favorite part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM DevTools, you can write and execute FetchXML from your browser hitting CRM. It even has full Intellisense support for the valid schema! The FetchXML execution area is just awesome.

The Fetch area is prefilled with a valid fetch statement to retrieve 25 accounts and you can edit that query to build up really complicated statements. As a developer who uses Visual Studio all day, I love having suggestions provided for what keyword to use next. It doesn’t eliminate the need for a reference (not for me, at least), but it makes writing Fetch a whole lot faster.

The second part of this area that I love is the results section. As you’re writing a query you can hit the “Fetch” button below the text area and it executes your query and shows the result set in json format. This is so useful for me while I write Fetch because it gives you a chance to test your query as you build it and verify all your links and filters are working correctly.

Drawbacks When Using DevTools

Since the DevTools was written as a Chrome extension, it’s only available for that browser. At CRMUG 2014, the developer from Sonoma was asked if this would be available for IE or other browsers and he said no (with valid reasons).

The big problem this causes me is when Chrome gets an update that makes it harder (or impossible) to use for some parts of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. When Chrome v37 came out last September, one of their changes made it so you can’t perform some CRM customizations. When this happened I started using IE more and I didn’t have this at my fingertips any more. This may not be a problem for you at all; it really depends on how you use CRM.