Bulk Edit Customize Dynamics CRM 2011 Entity Name Messages

Paul Nieuwelaar, 01 July 2012

In Dynamics CRM 2011, if we want to change a system entities name (for example a common one is changing ‘Account’ to ‘Company’ or ‘Business’), we can go into the customizations area, and modify the Display Name. Then we need to go through each of the System Views, and modify these. Finally, we would also go through each of the 80 entity messages, and update the naming in these.

This whole process can be quite time consuming, when in fact there is a much simpler option, which involves Exporting Translations, and then using Excel to Find/Replace the names.

There are a few steps involved here, but overall it is MUCH quicker than updating everything manually. In this example, I will be changing the name of the ‘Account’ entity to become ‘Company’.

1. Create a temporary solution; called something like ‘translations’. Add only the entity you want to modify (in this case Account).

2. Click on Export Translations from the top of the solution.

3. Extract the zip file, and open CrmTranslations.xml in Excel.

4. Copy the translation column (1033 column for English) from the ‘Display Strings’ and ‘Localized Labels’ tabs into a separate tab/sheet (temporary).

5. Select both columns, and then open the Find dialog (Ctrl + F). Switch to the Replace tab, and expand Options to select ‘Match Case’.

6. Perform a Find/Replace using the following conditions, in order of top to bottom (always plural first). Make sure to ‘Replace All’ for each one:
‘accounts’ -> ‘companies’
‘Accounts’ -> ‘Companies’
‘account’ -> ‘company’
‘Account’ -> ‘Company’

7. In this particular case, we need to replace ‘an account’ with ‘a company’. Since all instances of ‘account’ are already replaced, we can match against ‘an compan’ instead (‘compan’ will include ‘company’ ‘and companies’):
‘an compan’ -> ‘a compan’
‘an Compan’ -> ‘a Compan’
‘An Compan’ -> ‘A Compan’
‘An compan’ -> ‘A compan’

8. Copy each column back into their respective sheets (make sure not to try and override the header columns in the original, as they are read only).

9. Save the .xml file, then select all the solution files, and right click, Send To, Compressed Folder (give it the same name as the solution).

10. Back in CRM, go to Settings, Solutions, and select the solution which you exported the translations for. Click Import Translations from the toolbar.

11. Go through the wizard to select and upload the new translation zip file.

12. Once completed, you can delete the temporary solution (optional).

You will now notice throughout the system, the references to ‘Account’ have been replaced. You can check customizations to see the new messages being applied. If you check the Views and Fields you will also notice these have been updated to use ‘Company’ instead of ‘Account’.