Monday, April 17, 2017

View of views

Are you trying to find all the views that relate to the Account entity? Check this out! You can use Advanced Find to search for views. Here is how:

Open Advanced Find and choose “Views”

In the search criteria, choose FetchXML as the field you want to search and give it the schema name of the entity you are looking for:

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This will result in all the system views that involve the Account entity. The FetchXML field holds the names of all the entities that the view touches. How do you find the schema name for an entity? Open your default solution and look at the entity “name” field.

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I was initially looking for ways to document an existing system and then started thinking about ways I could generate some governance over the views in the system, but that will be a future blog post. Sadly, this will not help you find personal views, and unfortunately, you cannot export the results from the Advanced Find directly into Excel – I had to use the report builder to export the views into a format I could include into my documentation. But it can be helpful if you are about to perform major surgery on an undocumented system.