Release Notes for Plugin Trace Viewer

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ComboBox with CheckBoxes

Filtering by the found plugins, messages, and entities has been annoying when we could only select one until now; you can now select multiple available items!

Big thanks to @GuidoPreite in 2019, in Issue #83!

Finally, it has been implemented in my general helper, Rappen.XTB.Helper. Lovely getting the core from Martin Lottering on CodeProject, created in 2008.

Note! You can still type manually; for example, you can see the picture for plugins. It understands commas, asterisks, and exclamation marks.

Advanced Quick Filter

Quick Filter has been there forever, but it has been a bit stupid.

Now you can use the popup on the right side, select which fields it should look in, and set if all fields have to match or just one of them.

The really advanced option is at the bottom of the popup: it can revert the findings by selecting Not. If you know Regular Expressions, try to test the RegEx option!

This improvement may help @cseymr, who needed to be able to use RegEx, or similar, to only see those records you are interested in. Issue #207

Have you never found the Quick Filter? Press <CTRL>+F or see in the menu under Traces.

Quick Filter matches are highlighted

When the tracing log contains a lot of text, finding which record matches the quick filter may be difficult.

Highlighting them makes our lives easier. Don’t you agree?

Issue #206

Free Filtering before retrieving trace log

This is a great request from @Titoleto in Issue #171!

Using the Quick Filter, we are only hiding retrieved trace log records, which means we may not be able to find what we want, mainly due to the limitation in the Dataverse, that we can only get 5000 records at a time.

Filtering by any text in the Trace Message Block or the Trace Exception Details when we are retrieving them, you can get better filtering.

Filtering more granular

Issue #172 When retrieving trace log records, we can now also filter by:

• It is now possible to check/uncheck if MainOperation should be included. Useful, for example, by Custom APIs.
• Either minimum duration, or max duration, or both.
• Hard to know what is here? Click the linkable labels.

Small stuff

• Identifying even more records. Issue #204
• Identified records can now get a right-click to copy the link to the records. Issue #203

Some are big, some are small

This release has two small improvements:

• If it’s hard to find records – don’t bother; just move on instead of popping up error messages.
• Finding more records in tracing from Dunn & Bradstreet.

Identifying more records

Plugin Trace Viewers can now identify more types of records

• Guids and Records are now shown in the Exception window too.  Issue #199
• Table name can now be found both before and after the Guid.
• Finding more records, especially in error messages. See Issue #195. More is coming in later releases.
• The triggering record is now included in the list of records. Thanks @daryllabar for suggesting this Issue #196
• Added a legend about how guid, table and record are represented.

Bugfixes

• The button to get the new traces didn’t work after the last release. Now it works as it should again. Issue #194

Identifying Records

The biggest improvement since… ??

By default, this tool will try to identify records in the Plugin Trace Log.
Why did I add that? It’s hard to know guids…
Guids are not what you want to read; we want the tool to identify records that the plugin was working on and make them readable. Don’t you agree?

Do we need to find more records?
Please send what you need. Please send me example logs. I will try to find even more records!
Go to my GitHub Issue Find more records! and help me help you!

The found records can also easily be opened in your Model Driven App.

💙💛💙 New UI – just to feel fresh

I have updated most icons to make it easier to determine which you should click on and why.
Note: All icons shall now have colors dark blue, blue, and yellow colors. Just so you will recognize where this tool is built… 😏

I have also moved around a bit in the menu. Are you lost now? I hope you now find it easier anyway 😊

Added a few shortcuts:

• <CTRL>+F – show/hide the Quick Find panel.
• <ALT>+Z – to select/unselect word-wrap. Btw, same as in VS Code…
• <ALT>+G – set highlight Guids on/off.
• <ALT>+I – set/unset to try to identify records.

We don’t like milliseconds – we LOVE them! 😍

The milliseconds were added in 2019 after my suggest to Microsoft, and a lot of people agrees with me.
So I added it to my tools, in Plugin Trace Viewer by issue #81. Read about it here: https://jonasr.app/ms/

After a meeting with Microsoft and us MVPs tonight, I mentioned that some attributes (columns) in Trace Log has milliseconds available. They were happy and joy. And then Matt had to look at this tool, and he saw no milliseconds…

Oh darn, I have somehow lost it sometime since 2019…

Now milliseconds are back!

Hide Entity name from Steps

This is not necessary to see in the Steps column, just like the Plugin name created in the last release. This is just to make it easier to follow the traces. Issue #186.

Remember the Step setting when auto-updated

There was a small typo from me; I missed using the hiding feature to show only what we really need on the Step column. Now it does.

Working with the latest XrmToolBox

No more annoying errors like this!

Reported by @uippnortejoa – thanks for that! 🫡

Nice to hide Plugin name on Steps

Now it’s easier to read the result view for all traces.

Sorting now works well

Issue #53 was submitted by @seanmcne six and a half years ago to sort any type of data correctly, especially numbers, especially in the Duration column.
I fixed this issue in June 2017.
And now it came back… #bummer
NOW it is fixed, forever!

Finding Exception Messages

There was as old Issue #29 that was fixed back then, but Microsoft has changed here and there, so proper InvalidPluginExecutionException wasn’t found anymore.
Now it’s fixed in Issue #181.

Small things

• Filtering by plugin name wasn’t working well. Again, it’s because MS has changed a bit. Fixed in Issue #183
• Release Notes moved to this website.
• Show release notes when a new version is running.