You are probably familiar with the Data Dictionary, which gives you a great view of custom objects and fields with all the possible information about them. The Org Dictionary Report does the same thing for any other metadata type. So when you have complex information about workflows, page layouts, reports, or something similar, you can assemble a metadata report for it right here in the Org Dictionary.
Building a report
It is easy to use. All of your different metadata types are listed down the left-hand column. Select the type you are interested in and put the report together by moving elements over and rearranging them. Once you have made changes and selected some elements, that metadata type appears in bold. Open Preview Report to see the result right away. For Apex Classes, for example, you might get the class down the first column, then the version, then the status in the right-hand column.
Showing interior structure
You can also show the interior structure of your metadata objects, which is quite important for some of the more complex ones. Take Custom Objects as a familiar example: you can pull in the full name of the object, then the names of its fields, then the names of the picklist values. Open the Preview Report tab and you will see, say, the Account object and its fields — the Account Depth field with its values, the Active field with its values — so all of the custom fields and all of the picklist values appear together on one screen. You can do this for any of the arrays found in your different metadata asset types.
Building the display report
Check the values you are interested in and open the Display Report tab, and Snapshot assembles a comprehensive report across all of the selected objects.
Display options
Two options let you shape how the report reads:
- Show Data Types — data types are hidden by default; turn them on to see the actual type of each column.
- Camel Case — by default camel case is hidden, so element names read like regular English. Turn it off to see the actual API names, the XML element names, which is very useful for developers or for certain kinds of reports.
Changing either option updates everything across the entire report. Looking at Apex Classes, for instance, you can then see all of the different types available, including the enumerated values for the Status field — active, deleted, or inactive. This makes it much easier to understand your data and put together exactly the report you want to generate.
Scheduling and saving
As usual, you can schedule the report to be sent out to other people or saved to a folder — whatever you need to do.
The Org Dictionary generates a report on whatever piece or pieces of metadata you'd like to report on. You can customize it to show whatever elements of your metadata you need. There are universal elements, like name, created date, last modified by, etc, for every element at the top so you can always get that information when necessary, but each metadata asset will have its own unique elements that you can also report on.
You can also choose to preview one metadata asset by highlighting it in the left column and pulling in the appropriate elements, or you could check the box next to each asset to pull all of them into the same report under the Display Report tab.
Additionally, in the Display Report tab, you can color code your report to highlight specific results. For example, maybe you want to highlight certain page layouts with a particular name, you can color code the name field and anything that matches that criteria will be highlighted in the color of your choice. You can color code multiple elements.