Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Intellisense in Customizations.xml file - CRM 2011 / Easy way to edit Customizations.xml file in CRM 2011

     As you all know, customization plays a major role in MS Dynamics CRM. Sometimes we may confuse with tags in the Customization file. Hence intellisense is very helpful to speed up the editing process of Customization.xml file. To bring intellisense we just need to follow some simple steps.

Firstly download the latest SDK for MS Dynamics CRM 2011 and extract to a local folder. If you open the SDK folder you could find a folder called Schemas. This folder contains a few XML schemas. If we include these schemas in Visual studio, we will have intellisense for the Customizations.xml file.

So let's do it.
Go to Visual studio and choose XML tab and then select Schemas as shown below.

You could see a XML Schemas window. Click on the add button.




Extension of Schema files is .xsd. Choose customizationssolution.xsd and 3 xsd files which starts with the name ribbon as shown.


Add them to the existing XML Schemas as shown. And the click OK.


Here we go...

Note: Ctrl+ Spacebar - For Intellisense








Please remember to follow the order. For instance as shown above, Inside <CustomActions> tag we have  <CustomAction>. Hence Intellisense will show you<CustomAction> only if you get inside <CustomActions>.

Intellisense in Customizations.xml will save your valuable time.

Related article : How to place a custom button on the application ribbon of MS Dynamics CRM 2011
http://crmdm.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-place-custom-button-on-main-page.html
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4 comments:

  1. Satya28 June 2011 at 23:43

    Hi,
    I don't see the XML menu option in Visual Studio 2010. How can I enable that option?

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. D. MANJALY30 June 2011 at 17:56

    Hello,
    I am not sure about this. But please try the following.Navigate to
    View-->Toolbars-->Customize
    and Choose the command tab
    Just try here whether you could add missing link

    ReplyDelete
  3. Asad22 August 2011 at 08:16

    Hello Manjally,

    I followed the same steps to enable intellisense in VS 2010.But its not showing it?
    Any Idea?

    ReplyDelete
  4. D. MANJALY22 August 2011 at 17:41

    Hi Mohammd, Thats very strange. But I would recommend two things to try.
    1. Please try to do these steps once more by ensuring that the XSD files has got tick mark ( that those are selected). I remember sometimes I tried twice or thrice to get it working.
    2.Make sure that intellisense is tried at the right place. For instance it will not show any intellisense if the parent element doesn't have proper values or if there are no scope for intellisense between some elements.

    ReplyDelete