collection element

The collection element specifies a starting point for the connector. The connector creates one document for each member of the collection.

Attribute Description Required
name The name of the collection to crawl. The connector creates one document for each member of the collection. For example, if you specify name="accounts", the connector will create one document for each account in the Dynamics repository. Yes
filter A filter to retrieve only some of the members of the collection. The syntax to use to construct the filter is described by the Microsoft developer documentation. No

Example

The following example creates a document for each account in the repository:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<spec>
  <collection name="accounts">
    <item name="accountid" />
    <item name="name" />
    <item name="description" />
  </collection>
</spec>

An example of a document produced by this specification appears below:

<DOCUMENT>
  <DREREFERENCE>http://host/Dynamics/api/data/v8.1/accounts(34b8ffd0-4232-e611-80c5-0050569248a7)</DREREFERENCE>
  <accountid>34b8ffd0-4232-e611-80c5-0050569248a7</accountid>
  <description>This is the description</description>
  <name>Hewlett Packard Enterprise</name>
</DOCUMENT>

If you wanted to retrieve only some of the accounts, you could add a filter, for example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<spec>
  <collection name="accounts" filter="revenue gt 10000">
    <item name="accountid" />
    <item name="name" />
    <item name="description" />
  </collection>
</spec>

You can configure the connector to retrieve all of the items from more than one collection:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<spec>
  <collection name="accounts" filter="revenue gt 10000">
    <item name="accountid" />
    <item name="name" />
    <item name="description" />
  </collection>

  <collection name="...">
    ...
  </collection>
</spec>

This might be useful if you want to index information in different documents. For example, you might want to index a document for each of your accounts but separate documents for each support query logged for those accounts.