Extended CrmSvcUtil - Exporting an attribute list

A little feature of the Extended CrmSvcUtil I neglected to mention in my previous post (it was a late feature!) is the ability to export a list of strongly typed attribute names. This helps remove "magic strings" from your source and introduce some strongly typed attribute checking. This is useful, even when using Early Bound, as you often need to check the existence of an attribute.

For example, let's say you are writing a plugin that fires on update of contact and you wish to include a pre image containing the parent account. What you will often see is code like this:

if (preImage.Contains("parentcustomerid") == false)
{
    //trace / throw an exception stating the parent count hasn't been provided...
}

Checking for null is not the same as checking for existence, because some contacts might not have a parent account set. So the check for existence is often quite important. Using an attribute list allows you to strongly type this instead as follows:

if (preImage.Contains(ContactAttributes.ParentCustomer) == false)
{
    //trace / throw an exception stating the parent count hasn't been provided...
}

Another area where this is incredibly useful is when building queries using Query Expressions or Fetch Expressions. If you want to include a set of columns, or set a condition on an attribute you will end up with this type of code:

QueryExpression qe = new QueryExpression();
qe.EntityName = "contact";
qe.ColumnSet = new ColumnSet();
qe.ColumnSet.Columns.Add("parentcustomerid");

Being able to specify the attribute strongly, like the following looks much better:

qe.ColumnSet.Columns.Add(ContactAttributes.ParentCustomer);

This helps work around many issues, like typo bugs or name change, like in cases where somebody accidentally creates a field called "new_ProjjectType and wishes to fix the name of the field. If 5 or 6 plugins already reference this field and perform some logic based on its value you might end up with multiple "magic strings" to fix across your code. Using an attribute list is a 1 fix solution to the problem.

The source for the Extended CrmSvcUtil can be downloaded from git hub with the latest release available to download from here