XrmToolBox Plugin – Workflow Buddy

Workflow Buddy is an XrmToolBox plugin developed by Veritec. This plugin gives workflow developers the functionality to search within

• Workflow comments
• Stop statements
• Parameters used to call child workflows and actions

Business Need

As the focus of the CRM implementations is shifting towards achieving the business requirements with minimal amount of customisations (read code), workflows are becoming the core containers of the business logic. The complexity and scale of CRM workflows and actions is increasing, precisely because business logic is moving from JScript/Plugins (code) into workflows.

In a medium scale CRM implementation (e.g. the one which took a year to build), it is not uncommon to have 200 workflows triggering from various places -doing their bit and handing off the baton to subsequent workflow processes, and so forth.

Visual Studio provides a handy search feature where you search within a file, project or whole solution for a particular keyword. But there is nothing like that for CRM workflows. Although not as spectacular as VS search, this tool endeavours to cover this gap by providing a basic search on some of the commonly searched aspects

How to use Workflow Buddy

After installing the plugin from Plugin Store, launch it from XrmToolBox from the list of your plugins.

Once launched the tool should appear in a new tab

The plugin basically does a partial (contains) search in the following areas

Comments

Shown above with the orange arrow

Stop statement messages

Stop workflows with canceled are typically used to show validation errors. Those error messages can be searched with Workflow Buddy.

Parameters

Many times you pass string parameters to actions like child action names, relationship names, etc. Those string parameters can be searched too.

e.g. in the example below if we want to search who is calling an action (new_LeadSubmittherate). We can search for this and calling workflow will show up in the Workflow Buddy results.

 

Search

Let us search for a word Calculate and press Search

Any workflow that uses this keyword in either of the three areas discussed above will appear in the search results as below.

Then you can click on the workflow and it will open up directly in your default(selected) browser.

 

Hope this tool will increase the developer productivity of your organisation.

Cheers.