I wrote a blog post last month showing a way to quickly find where unstored calcs and summary fields are being used in a solution. This post is a sort of follow up, in that here we once again look at a way of quickly finding something out about a solution that would otherwise require a DDR.
Have you ever worked on a solution and had to make a change that involved a field in some way, and the change required that you find all the other places where that field was being used? For example, suppose that a full name field is being split into first and last name fields. You need to find what layouts the old field is on, so that you can add the new field accordingly.
You can create a DDR, but a quick-and-dirty way to do this is to use the LayoutNames and FieldNames design functions.
I created a script that iterates through all of the layouts in a solution file to see if the field in question exists on any of them. The script is completely portable and can be easily copied into other solutions without requiring any changes. You can see it in action by taking a look at this demo file.
Please be aware though that this technique won’t detect merge fields, which unfortunately seems to be a limitation of the FieldNames function.
As was the case with my previous blog post, this technique isn’t utilizing any revolutionary or ground-breaking approaches but is instead intended as a convenience, as yet another approach to stash away in your developer toolbox.
