I was playing around the new CRM 2013 SDK and thought I’d spend some time one the revamped metadata browser. Like in the CRM 2011 SDK, the Metadata browser is provided as a Managed Solution located in the folder “Your SDK Folder\Tools\MetadataBrowser”

Once you’ve installed the solution in your CRM application, you have to open it in order to get the links to the Metadata web resources in the configuration page.

The Metadata Browser now has two pages:

• Metadata Browser (displays a master/detail view of all the entities in the system)
• Entity Metadata Browser (displays details about a selected entity)

The key features of the tools are highlighted in the configuration page (see copy below). It is extremely helpful for developers, lightweight built on HTML/JavaScript and has a lot of nice features (details below). So if were looking for an alternative to the popular Silverlight Metadata browser built for CRM 2011, look no further, this is it!

Metadata Browser

• Select an entity to view using the Entity Metadata Browser
  
• Open the selected entity form in the default organization if the entity supports this
  
• Perform a text search to filter displayed entities using the following entity properties: SchemaName, LogicalName, DisplayName, ObjectTypeCode, or MetadataId
  
• Filter entities by any entity property values
  
• Filter the properties displayed for the selected entity
  

Entity Metadata Browser

• View all the properties for the entity and filter the properties displayed
  
• Open the selected entity edit form in the default organization if the entity supports this
  
• Change the entity that you want to view
  
• View the entity attributes in a master/detail view. With this view you can:
  
  • Open the selected attribute form in the default organization if the attribute supports this
    
  • Perform a text search to filter displayed attributes using the following attribute properties: SchemaName, LogicalName, DisplayName, or MetadataId
    
  • Filter attributes by any attribute property values
    
  • Filter the properties displayed for the selected attribute
    
• View entity relationships. With these views you can:
  
  • Open the selected relationship form in the default organization if the relationship supports this
    
  • Perform a text search to filter displayed relationships using values relevant to the type of relationship
    
  • Filter the relationship by any relationship value
    
• View entity privileges. With this view you can:
  
  • Filter the displayed privilege using the PrivilegeId