How to Retrieve the System User List Efficiently

Introduction

Ever wondered how to retrieve the User list from Microsoft CRM 3.0? Well, this tutorial will guide you step by step.

Background

I needed to get a list of all users in a CRM 3.0 system for a custom application, so I decided to utilize the Fetch feature of the Microsoft CRM 3.0 Web Service.

Using the code

Use this XML data to "fetch" the CRM users list:

<fetch mapping='logical'>
    <entity name='systemuser'>
        <all-attributes/>
    </entity>
</fetch>

The next part is to send this request and have the CRM return the result set.

Load the result set into an XmlDocument object.
Use the SelectNodes method to get the result set.

CRM will return the actual data in this format "resultset/result", it is the "result" table that holds the needed data.

Iterate through the returned XmlNodeList and do what you need to do with the data.

In the following example, I am building a drop down list:

string result = service.Fetch(fetchxml);
XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument();
xdoc.LoadXml(result);
XmlNodeList userList = xdoc.SelectNodes("resultset/result");
foreach(XmlNode n in userList)  
{  
    ListItem itm = new ListItem();
    itm.Text = n["fullname"].InnerText;
    itm.Value = n["systemuserid"].InnerText;
    ddlUserList.Items.Add(itm);
}