Xrm.Utility.getEntityMetadata() Have you explored it yet to get metadata in Dynamics 365

This API has been introduced for sometime now. However I still find that consultants are not using it and going with traditional querying through WebAPI method to get the Entity Metadata.

And there is a secret I am going to tell you why so many consultants abandoned this method. The reason for this is when this method was introduced it had a significant bug. So as per the documentation the nomenclature of the function goes like this.

Xrm.Utility.getEntityMetadata(entityName,attributes).then(successCallback, errorCallback)

To get the metadata for attributes, you would need to pass array of strings. Even if you did that, it shall return only statecode and statuscode field. It was certainly a bummer. But I just used it for a project and it seems to work just fine.

If you just want to get the Entity Metadata and not the attributes, pass empty array

Xrm.Utility.getEntityMetadata(“account”, []).then(
function(s){
// handle you success code here
}, function(e){
console.log(e.error.message);
});

The below code looks for account entity metadata with couple of attributes for account entity. Name is of type string and IndustryCode is of type optionset. In the sample code I have shown how to go through Options metadata as well.

Xrm.Utility.getEntityMetadata(“account”, [“name”, “industrycode”]).then(
    function (s) {
       var attributeCollection = s.Attributes().getAll();

 

      for (var a = 0; a < attributeCollection.length; a++) {
          var attrMetadata = attributeCollection[a];

 

         switch (attrMetadata.Type) {
             case “picklist”: {
                // get the options
                var optionsArr = attrMetadata.OptionSet;

 

               for (var k = 0; k < optionsArr.length; k++) {
                   var option = optionsArr[k];
                   console.log(“Text”, option.text);
                   console.log(“Value”, option.value);
                }
                break;
             }
          }
       }
    }, function (e) {
       console.log(e.error.message);
    });

Debajit Dutta

(Dynamics MVP & MCT)

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