CRM Web API Preview Samples

Yesterday, 10th June 2015, the CRM support team blogged about the newly published/updated Web API documentation. I feel they totally buried the lead, as the interesting new thing is not the API itself or the documentation (we have known about this for a while), but the samples included:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/webapipreview#samples

• Simple web API preview (C#): Introduces connecting to and authenticating with the web API in the simplest way, without using helper code.

• Basic Operations with web API preview (C#): Introduces performing basic Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete (CRUD) operations with HttpClient and helper classes to manage connections and authentication.

• WebAPIPreviewService (C#): Provides a helper class library with methods to perform the each of the operations possible using only HttpClient and JSON.NET.

• Sdk.WebAPIPreview.js (JavaScript): Provides a helper library with methods to perform the each of the operations possible using only native browser XMLHttpRequest with web resources. This library does not include authentication.

• WebAPIPreview Documentation Generator (C#): Generates documentation based on the web API service metadata documentation to represent custom entities, attributes, and custom actions included in an organization. This will create web pages containing the equivalent content.

If you have ever struggled to integrate Dynamics CRM with an app written in node.js, Java, Ruby, Objective-C or any other language that doesn't really do .NET WCF without jumping through hoops, then you will understand the allure of having a powerful and detailed RESTful and standard compliant API, not just with CRUD messages, but with high level complex platform support. Hopefully there will be more samples going forward, but this is an excellent start.

I can't wait to have a go at the documentation generator!