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Catalog Manager for XrmToolBox

Business Events (still in preview at the time of writing) are opening up new paradigms for event-driven patterns in the Dataverse. (👉see Microsoft press release).

Essentially, They rely on 2 new tables Catalog and Catalog Assignment that are surfaced in the Solution explorer.

Catalog Tables in the solution explorer

However, the authoring capabilities are limited for the moment and it’s hard to have a high level view of the Catalogs in your environment. Hence the idea behind the Catalog Manager tool for XrmToolBox.

Catalog Manager Tool

The tool can be downloaded within the XrmToolBox Plugin manager. Once installed it will be available in the tools section.

360° View on Catalogs

The goal of the tool is to provide full visibility on the Catalogs and Catalog Assignements registered in your Dataverse environment.

You can (1) select existing Catalogs or (2) Create new ones from scratch.

Once a root Catalog is selected, you have access to all the relevant information about the Catalog at your fingertips. There is also a treeview to see the Catalog full structure.

You can perform all CRUD operations on the Catalogs, Categories (2nd level Catalogs) and Catalog Assignments very efficiently in the same UX.

Create Root Catalog screen

For Catalog Assignments, you can link your assignment to a (1) Table, (2) a Custom API or (3) a Custom Process.

screenshot_create_assignment.png (560Ă—302)
Create Catalog Assignment screen

To create Custom APIs for your Catalogs, you can use the Custom API Manager tool for XrmToolBox

More on Business Events

If you are curious about the Dataverse Business Event model, don’t miss these official Microsoft press release.

There is also a very good post from Natraj Yegnaraman that shows how to leverage Business Events to trigger a PowerAutomate Flow.

While the Business Events model is still in it’s infancy, I have a feeling that we will hear more and more about it and that it will open new possibilities for developers. I hope the Catalog Manager tool will prove to be handy.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback so I can improve the user experience. Also if you have any âť“ questions or đź’ˇ feature requests don’t hesitate to contact me in the discussion area of the GitHub repo.

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