NEIL PARKHURST

With the latest release of Unified Service Desk (USD) for Dynamics 365 we have some cool new features in the debugger in this post I will highlight these new features.

I’m going to assume you’re already familiar with the existing debugger features! Don’t worry if you aren’y, you can find a summary of the existing features here.

Copy Data

The new copy data facility lets us copy information shown in the action calls tab into the clipboard.

Why is this important???? ….. well often I will be in the debugger and see an issue with a particular action. That information will have useful snippets of information contained within it. Such as the GUID of the offending record. Being able to grab this information means I can paste it into Notepad. And then from there I use the information to help me diagnose issues.

You can also select numerous actions and paste into another application. I am finding this really useful when debugger as I can then use that application to search the results. Below you can see that I have pasted a load of actions into Excel.

Note: Pretty much all of the details from the action tab are transferred to the clipboard, which is nice. However, I have noticed that the date created and duration fields do not show in the output.

So how do we achieve this? …. Well it is as simple as you’d expect! Simply view the action calls, select the row (or rows) you want to copy, right click and away you go.

As I am mentioning copy / paste of debugger information. It might be worth pointing out that we can already copy details from the debug output tab. As shown below.

And when viewing data parameters there is a copy function which copies the name of the currently selected data parameter into the clipboard.

Refresh the Unified Service Desk Client

The next new debugger feature allows to quickly refresh the Unified Service Desk Client to use the latest configuration. Why is this cool? Well as a developer I often make minor tweaks to my Unified Service Desk configuration and want to quickly see the impact of those changes. Sometime I actually make the change on the fly from within the debugger.

Doing the refresh is as simple as selecting the new refresh icon on the action calls tab in the debugger.

Tip: If you don’t know you can actually alter and save an action directly in the debugger. I often use the save icon on the direction action tab to create or edit existing actions.

In my testing of this new feature I found a couple of minor glitches. (Hopefully they will be addressed in later releases.) Some of them maybe be specific to my environment. But regardless of these this is still a really useful feature. The debugger is a developer tool, if you want perfection simply close the application and reload from scratch …. which I suggest is a test you’d ultimately need to do anyway! But this is still a useful way to quickly try things out whilst you are “hacking” around looking for solution.

Below I highlight a couple of the glitches I ‘ve found. Firstly, I use the generic CTI application. On the reload of USD I received an error message that it failed to initialize. This didn’t cause me any great issues. As it wasn’t CTI functionality I was trying to retest.

I also use some “SaveSettings” actions, something that might not be very common! The SaveSetting action writes out user options at runtime. The user options don’t seem to get refreshed when USD re-loads from the debugger. Again, a pretty minor issue that didn’t cause me any concern.

Changes in debugger functionality might not immediately sound like a major benefit but as developer (of sorts) I can say these changes will definitely help me. And anything that helps a developer be more productive has got to be a good thing. J