Web Services: MetadataService

[Applies to: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0]

The metadata for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation is in tables in the Microsoft SQL Server database. These tables contain the entity, attribute, and relationship definitions for each organization. This includes the metadata for your customizations.

The MetadataService Web service contains the messages that you use to read or write the definitions for all the entities in a Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation. It can also be used to build a client-side cache.

The metadata service can be used to perform the following actions:

Read Actions

• Retrieve all the metadata to create a metadata cache in a client application.
• Determine whether the metadata has changed since a previous retrieve.
• Retrieve all the entities and determine which ones are custom entities.
• Retrieve the metadata for a specific entity, either system or custom.
• Retrieve the attributes for an entity.
• Retrieve the metadata for a specific attribute such as the possible state names or picklist values for an attribute.

Write Actions

• Create a custom entity.
• Add or update an attribute for an entity, either system or custom.
• Create or delete a relationship between two entities.
• Add or remove an option from a picklist attribute.
• Write an installation and uninstall program for your custom solution.

In This Section

Using the MetadataService Web Service

Describes how to use the MetadataService Web service.

Metadata Object Model

Shows the object model for the metadata Web service.

Metadata Messages

Describes the messages available in the metadata Web service.

Publishing the Metadata

Explains how to publish the metadata.

Other Resources

List of Samples in the SDK Download

Contains the metadata diagram full sample that reads the metadata and uses Visio to draw an entity relationship diagram.

See Also

Reference

• MetadataService Web Service

Tasks

• How to Detect Metadata Changes
• How to Retrieve the Metadata
• How to Retrieve the Localized State Name
• How to Retrieve the Status Codes for Account

Other Resources

• Blog: Advanced Metadata Service Scenarios