XrmToolBox is undoubtedly the best free third-party productivity tool for D365 developers. A few days back, one person in the forum was trying to use third-party XrmToolBox plugin in On-Premises environment where the internet was not available for some reason. Let’s see how to handle this situation.
To use any XrmToolBox plugin without the internet we have to grab the DLL of the plugin, which you can get in two ways.
Get the DLL from an already-installed XrmToolBox
Navigate to %AppData%\McrmTools\XrmToolBox\Plugins on the machine where you have already installed the desired XrmToolBox plugin and find the DLL.
For example, I have this plugin installed and I want this in my non-internet environment.
Look for the DLL with this/similar name, may contain author name etc. For this one DLL is Ryr.XrmToolBox.EntityImageUpdater.dll.
Build the DLL from source code if open source
You can navigate to XrmToolBox.com/plugins/ and search for the desired plugin.
Once you find it, check whether it’s open source. Navigate to source code location, grab it and build it. This awesome plugin is developed by Natraj Yegnaraman and the source code is hosted at GitHub/rajyraman/Ryr.XrmToolBox.EntityImageUpdater
After building the code grab the DLL from bin/debug or bin/release(preferred, build with release config).
Place DLL & use the plugin in non-internet environment
Now, move the above grabbed DLL to the destination environment, and place the DLL in the same folder, i.e., %AppData%\MscrmTools\XrmToolBox\Plugins. And here you go. Open XrmToolBox and you will see this plugin in plugin list, you can use it like any other plugin.
A few things to consider
- Some plugins use the internet to achieve functionality. Those can’t be used.
- Bigger plugins may contain more data/folder other than DLL, so all data should be moved properly.
- Folder location may change (rare cases) and you should be careful about that.