TL;DR

  1. Extract the package with 7-Zip
  2. Open the extracted file in a VS Code / Notepad++ / text-editor-of-choice
  3. Edit the xml as required
  4. Use 7-Zip to compress in gzip format

Editing Config Packages

Sometimes you might want to edit a config package file without having to import and export a modified copy from BC. In my case I wanted to remove the Social Listening Setup table from the package. Microsoft have made this table obsolete and BC throws an error if I try to import the package with this table present. (Probably not a bad idea – stopping listening to socials).

Fortunately, a rapidstart file is just a compressed xml file. Extract the rapidstart file with 7-Zip and then open the extracted file in a text editor. The format of the file is pretty straight forward. Each table is represented with an XYZList node where XYZ is the name of the table which the table-level settings followed by one or more XYZ nodes with the data.

Here are two records for the Payment Terms table.


  3
  4
  1
  
    10 DAYS
    <10D>
    
    
    0
    Net 10 days
    0
    
    
    {6BD87497-B233-EB11-8E89-E8FD151D8C93}
  
  
    14 DAYS
    <14D>
    
    
    0
    Net 14 days
    0
    
    
    {6DD87497-B233-EB11-8E89-E8FD151D8C93}

All I need to do is find the offending Social Listening Setup node in my file and remove it. Here it is:

SocialListeningSetupList node

Once you are finished editing you can use 7-Zip to compress the file again with the gzip method and import.

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