Comentality

Release

Document Template XRay is in the Tool Library

Open a Dynamics document template in Word and you see grey placeholder text. Three of the controls say description. Two say name. address1_city is there four times. Every table in Dataverse has a description and a createdon, so the moment a template pulls in a related record the page fills with controls that look identical and read from different places. Which is which is an XPath expression in a custom XML part inside the file, and Word will not show it to you without clicking each control in turn.

A Dynamics 365 account template open in Word. Three content controls read description, two read name, and nothing on screen says which table each one belongs to.

Document Template XRay reads the .docx instead. A .docx is a zip archive; the bindings are in word/document.xml and the header and footer parts, and reading them is a file operation, not an interactive one.

The same template in Document Template XRay. The three description controls resolve to account/description, account/account_parent_account/description and account/account_primary_contact/description.

The three description controls turn out to be the account, its parent account and its primary contact. With a connection open, logical names resolve to display names from metadata, so telephone1 on the account reads Main Phone and telephone1 on the contact reads Business Phone.

What it does

  • Fetches the Word templates in the connected environment, or opens any .docx from disk. Drag and drop works.
  • Flat list — every field reference with its table, column, tag, alias, the repeating section it sits in, and whether it is in the body, a header or a footer.
  • Tree view — the same fields grouped by their entity and relationship path, so the three description leaves hang off three different parents.
  • Repeating sections are marked, and every field inside one is tagged with the section it repeats under.
  • Display names come from Dataverse metadata when connected. Without a connection you still get the logical paths.

What it does not do

It reads. It does not edit a template, fix a broken binding, or tell you which templates a schema change is about to break on its own — but once the bindings are a list, “which templates touch this column” is a question with an answer, and that was the point.

Install

Search for Document Template XRay in the XrmToolBox Tool Library. The source is MIT.

XrmToolBox is not ours. It is somebody else’s, it is free, and it is the reason a practice this size can ship anything at all.

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