Dynamics CRM XML Schema Validation

Article
01/08/2016

Sometimes you will find that you need to modify the customizations.xml file from a solution, for example when you want to change the sitemap or other tasks which are done by modifying the xml. In those situations, some will just use Notepad, but you could be introducing some unwanted errors in the xml without noticing, so it would be good to know if the file is ok before facing issues when importing it back. It would also be nice to not have to enter all the tags manually especially if we are adding very many. You can achieve all this by using schema validation in Visual Studio:

Download the CRM SDK. For example for CRM 2016 you can get it from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50032.

Copy the xsd files from the Schemas folder of the SDK, and paste them onto Visual Studio’s schemas folder. For Visual Studio 2015 that would be %programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Xml\Schemas, or in \1033 depending on the language.

Now open the customizations.xml file in Visual Studio, go to Properties (Ctrl + W, P) > Schemas > …

- Find the CustomizationsSolution.xsd file we just added, and in the “Use” column > select Use this schema, and click OK:

- Now in your customizations.xml, you can start modifying it and it will validate your changes and use IntelliSense to save us some typing and give us information on each tag:

Dynamics CRM XML Schema Validation

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