CRM 2011 Programatically Finding the Values of Picklists, Optionsets, Statecode, Statuscode and Boolean (Two Options)

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When developing for CRM 2011 I’m pretty much always going to be setting the values of picklists (local and global optionsets), statecodes, statuscodes and booleans (two options) – the sorts of fields I’m talking about here are the ones highlighted in orange below. Usually I will know the label off the top of my head but I don’t always have the actual number value which is required to set the attribute correctly.

So usually I will open CRM up or use a metadata browser to find the actual value and then just hardcode it in – I don’t expect the optionset to change and if it does I will probably have to revisit the code to change more than just a hardcoded value.

However sometimes I cant be arsed with all that, sometimes I do need to find the value dynamically for a variety of reasons, e.g. laziness, convenience or occasionally an actual real requirement for it.

In any case here’s a function that when given an entity name and attribute name will return a dictionary of string labels (user localised) and corresponding int values. I won’t bother to go into any great detail on the code, but basically it just issues a RetrieveAttributeRequest, checks the AttributeType on the RetrieveAttributeResponse and then builds the dictionary.

static Dictionary<String, int> GetNumericValues(IOrganizationService service, String entity, String attribute)
{
    RetrieveAttributeRequest request = new RetrieveAttributeRequest
    {
        EntityLogicalName = entity,
        LogicalName = attribute,
        RetrieveAsIfPublished = true
    };

    RetrieveAttributeResponse response = (RetrieveAttributeResponse)service.Execute(request);

    switch (response.AttributeMetadata.AttributeType)
    {
        case AttributeTypeCode.Picklist:
        case AttributeTypeCode.State:
        case AttributeTypeCode.Status:
            return ((EnumAttributeMetadata)response.AttributeMetadata).OptionSet.Options
                .ToDictionary(key => key.Label.UserLocalizedLabel.Label, option => option.Value.Value);

        case AttributeTypeCode.Boolean:
            Dictionary<String, int> values = new Dictionary<String, int>();

            BooleanOptionSetMetadata metaData = ((BooleanAttributeMetadata)response.AttributeMetadata).OptionSet;

            values[metaData.TrueOption.Label.UserLocalizedLabel.Label] = metaData.TrueOption.Value.Value;
            values[metaData.FalseOption.Label.UserLocalizedLabel.Label] = metaData.FalseOption.Value.Value;

            return values;

        default:
            throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException();
    }
}

Then it’s pretty straight forward to use the label as a key to get the int value:

OptionSetValue optionSetValue = new OptionSetValue(GetNumericValues(proxy, "new_test", "new_local")["One"]);

So using the entity shown in the image, I can get all values for the various types of fields.

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