Slim Solution, a Plugin for XrmToolbox

Recently, I was given many unmanaged Dynamics 365 solutions to maintain. The thing I hate about solution is that they can become messy with a click of a button when you add an existing component to it. By Messy I mean there are a lot of things that are not needed but added to the solution. If you add the Case entity, many developers do add the whole case entity even though one or 2 fields are needed to be modified, the rest of the information is confusing and it is not very straight forward to clean that up.

The problem gets worse when you want to build a managed solution out of the unmanaged one. The managed solution needs to be very clear on what it does to what parts of the system. If the managed solution changes one case field, adds a new relationship then those the only changes that need to exist in the solution.

While cleaning out the solutions manually, by looking at their managed exports (you can know if a component has changed by looking at its managed XML export). I decided to write a very small XrmToolbox plugin that helps me in that. I wrote the plugin sometime ago but it took a while to validate it as XrmToolbox has a new lengthy validation process.

The basic idea of the plugin is that it checks all the managed entities that are added into the solution, find which field, form or view is either customized or added to that managed entity. Then it will tell you which components need to be in the solution so that you can remove the rest.

The plugin is called SlimSolution and it is currently available for download in the XrmToolbox. It is still lacking many of the features I want such as checking other component types but I will be adding those in the near future.

An example of the usage of this plugin would be something like this. You create a solution (or other developers do) and you want to clean it up from the unwanted components. As an example, I created the below solution that has:

1. A custom unmanaged entity
2. 3 managed entities in which I did add all components to them and metadata.
3. I modified/added some fields in the account and KB article entities and did nothing to the Agreement entity.

What I want is to clean up this solution by only keeping the managed entities that have been customized.

When you open the SlimSolution plugin, you first load the solutions and hit Check Solution. A somewhat nice summary appears on the right with some details and suggestions on what are the changes that need to stay in those managed entities. Of course and as I mentioned above, the plugin only checks for Forms, Views and Fields for now and gives you the list of components that need to stay in the solution.

You can see that the unmanaged entity is not mentioned because the plugin assumes unmanaged entities are created to be included in the solution (not always the case though but this is the assumption here). You will see information about what needs to stay from the account and KB entities because they were modified. You don’t see anything for the agreement entity which means that whole entity can be removed from the solution.

In addition to the above, if the solution contains some inactive processes/BPFs/Dialogs, it will alert you to remove them from the solution. The code for this plugin is constructed in away that makes adding component validators an easy task which I will do in the near future as I have some other validator ideas in mind.