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How-to: describe

crm describe emits a machine-readable catalogue of the whole command tree — every command, its options and arguments, Choice enums, defaults, and envvars. It is built for agents and scripts that need to discover the CLI surface without parsing --help text.

It walks the live Click objects, so it needs no D365 connection and pulls in no extra dependencies. Pair it with --json for the structured envelope.

See the CLI reference for the full flag list.

Whole tree

crm --json describe

{
  "ok": true,
  "data": {
    "root_options": [
      {
        "name": "json_mode",
        "opts": ["--json"],
        "secondary_opts": [],
        "type": "boolean",
        "required": false,
        "is_flag": true,
        "multiple": false,
        "choices": null,
        "default": false,
        "envvar": null
      }
    ],
    "commands": [
      {
        "name": "add-attribute",
        "path": "metadata add-attribute",
        "help": "Add a column to an existing entity.",
        "is_group": false,
        "args": [
          {"name": "entity", "type": "text", "required": true,
           "multiple": false, "choices": null, "default": null}
        ],
        "params": [
          {"name": "kind", "opts": ["--kind"], "type": "choice",
           "required": true, "is_flag": false, "multiple": false,
           "choices": ["string", "memo", "integer", "bigint", "decimal",
                       "double", "money", "boolean", "datetime", "picklist",
                       "multiselect", "lookup", "image", "file"],
           "default": null, "envvar": null}
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}
  • root_options — the sticky global flags (--json, --dry-run, --profile, --auth-scheme, --log-level, --stage-only, --session, …) that apply to every invocation rather than to one subcommand.
  • commands — a flat list; groups and their subcommands both appear, each with its full path (e.g. metadata add-attribute). is_group marks group nodes.
  • args are positional; params are options. Choice enums are surfaced verbatim, in declaration order. Boolean flag-pairs expose both forms — opts holds the on-form (--publish), secondary_opts the off-form (--no-publish).
  • The interactive repl leaf is excluded — it is not meant to be driven programmatically.

One subtree

Pass a top-level command name to scope the walk to that subtree. This imports only that one command module — a lazy win over the full walk:

crm --json describe metadata

Human-readable

Without --json, describe prints a command | kind | help table:

crm describe