Sample: Dump table definitions to a file

  • Article

This sample shows how to write out all table definitions to an XML file. It uses the RetrieveAllEntitiesRequest message.

The following sample creates a new file at \Entities\bin\Debug\EntityInfo.xml. You can open this file in Office Excel to see a tabular report. You may need this information to discover the entity type code for a custom table for use in reports.

SDK for .NET: Dump table definitions to a file sample code

How to run this sample

  1. Download or clone the Samples repo so that you have a local copy.
  2. (Optional) Edit the dataverse/App.config file to define a connection string specifying the Microsoft Dataverse instance you want to connect to.
  3. Open the sample solution in Visual Studio and press F5 to run the sample. After you specify a connection string in dataverse/App.config, any sample you run will use that connection information.

If you do not specify a connection string in dataverse/App.config file, a dialog will open each time you run the sample and you will need to enter information about which Dataverse instance you want to connect to and which credentials you want to use. This dialog will cache previous connections so that you can choose a previously used connection.

Those samples in this repo that require a connection to a Dataverse instance to run will include a linked reference to the dataverse/App.config file.

What this sample does

The RetrieveAllEntitiesRequest message is intended to be used in a scenario that contains data that is needed to retrieve metadata information about all the tables.

How this sample works

In order to simulate the scenario described in What this sample does, the sample will do the following:

Setup

Checks for the current version of the org.

Demonstrate

  1. The RetrieveAllEntitiesRequest method retrieves the metadata.
  2. The StreamWriter creates an instance of StreamWriter to write text to a file.

Clean up

This sample creates no records. No cleanup is required.