Document Template Manager update!

Microsoft Dataverse has this nice feature to generate Word (and now PDF) document based on a Word template. Nevertheless, Microsoft never put enough love in this feature and it's quite boring to manage these templates.

You can create create them easily but it was then not possible to update them through the UI, only through api.

Jim Novak created this excellent tool : Document Template Manager. It allows to download/upload templates in XrmToolBox in an easy way. Since then, Jim got his blue badge and let me maintain this tool.

I added last year the possibility to refresh metadata and add/remove relationships. This ease the update process since you don't have to copy/paste existing template content to a newly template using latest metadata. All you have to do is to refresh columns, download your template and add new columns in your template if needed.

There is more in the latest release!

I must confess that I started to work again on this tool because I needed to update a template and something was buggy, so I had to fix faulty code. Then I found that it would be nice to have more features in this tool. So, here is a new release with the following features:

New filters

You can now filter templates by associated table and/or language.

Edit template name and description

This can be done directly in the properties panel, and then clicking on Save button.

More visual actions

Instead of menu buttons, I added a kind of "control" panel on the right side which is more visual.

Drag & drop files to upload documents

You can drop one or multiple files to update your templates. Might be easier than browsing for files, which is by the way still available by clicking on the control.

Contextual help

The help is contextual to the hovered action instead of having a big yellow panel that was not always rendering all the help depending on the size of the tool.

Create a new Word template

You can create a new template directly from the tool. The associated table is automatically detected and you can define the name and the language of the template.

Transform Word document to template

This is one the most helpful feature of this new release, in my opinion. Before this release, the process to create a template was to download an empty template and build the content or copy/paste the content from an existing document in the empty template. But this could be challenging depending on the content complexity (header/footer, full page illustration, etc.).

Now, you can "transform" a Word document into a template by adding the XML metadata required to insert content from Dataverse. You can choose the table to use and its relationships, if needed. The document will be updated with the XML content and saved as a new document to avoid modifying the source document.

This way, you will be able to add content from Dataverse directly in the document you already have, then create the template in Dataverse.

Download

As usual, you can find the updated version in XrmToolBox Tool Library or you should be prompted to update it next time you open this tool.

Enjoy!