How-to: dashboard

Author organization-owned system dashboards headlessly — list, get, create, and delete systemform records with type = 0 without opening the dashboard designer. See the CLI reference for every flag.

A dashboard's layout lives in its formxml column. The CLI does not generate that XML — it posts the file you give it verbatim — so authoring a dashboard from source control means committing its FormXml and recreating it with dashboard create. systemform also backs every other form type (main, quick-create, card, …); every dashboard verb scopes its reads to type eq 0, so the group only ever sees dashboards.

List dashboards

crm dashboard list

Output columns: name, formid, and isdefault. list returns only these list-oriented fields — to read a dashboard's formxml, use dashboard get <id>.

Get a single dashboard

crm dashboard get 1111aaaa-2222-bbbb-3333-cccccccccccc

get returns the dashboard's FormXml in the --json envelope — capture it into source control to version a dashboard:

crm --json dashboard get <id> | jq -r '.data.formxml' > dashboard.xml

Create a dashboard

crm dashboard create --name "Sales Overview" --formxml dashboard.xml

--formxml takes the path to a dashboard FormXml file. The created record is an organization-owned dashboard (objecttypecode none), not bound to a single table. The server validates the FormXml, so a malformed layout is rejected with a 400. A round-tripped FormXml from dashboard get is the most reliable starting point.

Interactive dashboards are not creatable

Interactive-experience (type-10) dashboards cannot be created over the Web API. Passing --interactive fails fast with a clear error instead of silently creating a standard dashboard:

crm dashboard create --name "X" --formxml d.xml --interactive
# error: Interactive-experience (type-10) dashboards are not programmatically
# creatable over the Web API — author them in the dashboard designer.

Publishing

dashboard create runs PublishAllXml by default (the CLI-wide convention shared with chart create, form clone, etc.), so a new dashboard is visible immediately. Defer the publish with --no-publish to batch several operations before a single publish:

crm dashboard create --name "Q" --formxml d.xml --no-publish
crm solution publish    # publish when ready

Add the dashboard to a solution

crm dashboard create --name "Q" --formxml d.xml --solution cwx_crmworx

Use --require-solution to fail if no solution name resolves (from --solution or the profile default).

Preview without writing

crm --dry-run dashboard create --name "Q" --formxml d.xml

Returns {_dry_run: true, would_create: {entity_set, body}} with the fully resolved request body; no dashboard is created.

Delete a dashboard

crm dashboard delete 1111aaaa-2222-bbbb-3333-cccccccccccc

Under --dry-run, delete returns {_dry_run: true, would_delete: true, formid: <id>} without issuing the DELETE. To remove a dashboard from a solution (rather than delete it), use crm solution remove-component.