Monday, February 23, 2009

CRM 4.0 Picklist Generator Tool

Hi everyone,

To generate the picklist options in the application I work on, i'm always using the CRM 4.0 Picklist Item generator created by http://marioraunig.blogspot.com/, which I think is a great tool - quick and easy!

Often however I find that I need a few more features and so i've written my own utility for generating these codes, which over time I plan on adding more features too.

Find it here:

http://www.codeplex.com/CRMPicklistGenerator



For the moment, I've added the following features which I've found useful....

1. You can specify which number to use as the picklist value.
2. Options are specified as

[value], [description]
OR
[value],"[description]"

where [value] is the underlying value (int) and [description] is the pick list option description that's shown to the user.

3. You can sort by the description (deals with comma's in description as well).
4. You can specify which language code you want the list to use.
5. Allows comma's in descriptions and removes quotes

In order to use it,

1. Generate the option list
2. Open up your customization.xml file in Notepad or Visual Studio
3. Find the appropriate section of the xml file
4. Paste the generated option list into the xml file
5. Re-import the customization.xml file.

Anyway, hope it's handy for someone out there...

Cheers

Matt.