Counting Sheeps

One of the strangest part of the Dynamics CRM WebApi is the pluralisation of the entity names.

In the old OData endpoint, the entity set name was <EntityLogicalName>Set – however in the OData 4.0 endpoing, the Logical Name is pluralised by using a simplistic set of rules which often results in the incorrect plural name being picked.

This introduced a conundrum – Performance vs. correctness. Do we query the metadata for the Entity Set name at runtime – or use a duplicate set of over simplified rules in our JavaScript?

The New Version 9 Client Side API

The good news is that with version 9, the Xrm Api now supports:

Xrm.Utility.getEntitySetName("contact")

This will return "contacts" and so we can safely use this without worrying if the plural name is correct or not or indeed if it changes in the future.

UPDATE: As it turns out - this method isn't actually documented and so we have to use the getEntityMetadata function to be fully supported - see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/developer/clientapi/reference/xrm-utility/getentitymetadata

You can use it as follows:

Xrm.Utility.getEntityMetadata("lead",["EntitySetName"])
.then(function(m){
console.log(m.EntitySetName);
})

Hope this helps!