MSCRM Shop: January 2013

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

CCOLA forms in Polaris(CRM2011)

Rollup 12 or Polaris is out for few weeks now. Microsoft have also release the server components for on-premise deployment today.I am playing with Polaris for few weeks now. There are a lot of new features introduced in Polaris and one of them is guided process flow forms or CCOLA forms. CCOLA forms stands for Contact, Case, Opportunity, Lead and Account entities.These forms are available only in CRM Online at this stage.

These new forms guide the sales and customer service teams through the

Sales Process (More Details)
Case Resolution process (More Details)

The new forms comes with Process flow and classic form views. The following screen shots display the process flow form for lead entity.

The classic version of these forms are like original CRM forms. Some of the feature are available in both versions of the new forms. For e.g. Bing map integration and Customer details control( Control displaying few fields customer record on case entity).

Good things about new process flow forms

Guided process flow
Inline editing – No more pop up windows
Bing map integration (for lead contact and account entity forms)
Skype integration
Auto Save
Customer detail pane ( I really like this control. Now we can display the customer’s email and phone number on case entity)

Limitations of new process flow forms

Call the following points the limitations or the scope for the improvements in future releases.

Does not support java script
Left Navigation functionality is limited. You can display the related records but you can’t add a new record. The only way to add new records to switch it to classic view or add the grid on the form.
New button will only allow you to create a new record of same type. For e.g New Button on lead entity will open up a new lead entity form.
There is an option on the process flow form to switch to classic view but there is no option to switch back to process flow view.

Conclusion

This is a good start. I am hoping for a lot of improvements in near future. I would like to see the Bing map integration and customer detail pane as controls, so we can use them where ever we want in the system. Check the following link to learn about all the new features available in rollup 12.

http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/RC/2011/en-us/whatsnew.aspx?ver=5.1#BKMK_NewSales

Please leave the feed back and add more good things or limitations to the list.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

White House’s official response to the building of death star petition.

This is my first blog that has nothing to do with CRM. But it is very funny. Around 34435 people signed the petition to secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016. BC. By law , White House has to respond to any petition signed by more than 25000 people. Here is the official response by White House.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-youre-looking .

Generic solution to add missing associated views to the form navigation

This is the part 2 of my last blog Step by step tutorial to add the missing associated views to a CRM form. This blog will extend the solution to make it more generic. In the previous solution we have to add the relationship name in HTML web resource, which means that we have to create multiple HTML web resources if we want to add multiple associated views in the system.
I have updated the solution to pass the relationship name as parameter(query string) to the HTML resource. This way we can use the same HTML web resource as many times as we want.

Here is the updated code for the HTML web resource.

 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >  
 <head>  
   <title>Untitled Page</title>  
   <style type="text/css">html,body{font-family: Segoe UI, Tahoma, Arial;background-color: #d6e8ff;border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;}</style>  
   <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">  
       //debugger;  
       //get the context  
       var Xrm = window.parent.Xrm;  
       //get the current object id  
       var oId = Xrm.Page.data.entity.getId();  
       //get the object type  
       var oType = Xrm.Page.context.getQueryStringParameters().etc;  
       //set Relationship Name  
       var relName = getDataParam();  
       if (relName != "not found") {  
         //building a url  
         var sUrl = "/userdefined/areas.aspx?oId=" + oId + "&oType=" + oType + "&pagemode=iframe&security=852023&tabSet=" + relName;  
         //get relative path with orgname as required  
         var relativeUrl = Xrm.Page.context.prependOrgName(sUrl);  
         window.location = relativeUrl;  
       }  
       else {  
         noParams();  
       }  
       //Most of this code is from sdk dataparams example  
       function getDataParam() {    
       //Get the any query string parameters and load them into the vals array  
         var vals = new Array();  
         if (location.search != "") {  
           vals = location.search.substr(1).split("&");  
           for (var i in vals) {  
             vals[i] = vals[i].replace(/\+/g, " ").split("=");  
           }  
           //look for the parameter named 'data' and return relationship name  
           for (var i in vals) {  
             if (vals[i][0].toLowerCase() == "data") {  
               var relationship = decodeURIComponent(vals[i][1])  
               relationship = relationship.replace(/\+/g, " ")  
               return vals[i][1];  
             }//endif  
           } //end for loop  
           return "not found";  
         }//endif  
         else {  
           return "not found";  
         }  
       }// end function  
       function noParams() {  
         var message = document.createElement("p");  
         message.innerText = "No data parameter was passed to this page";  
         document.body.appendChild(message);  
       }  
   </script>  
 </head>  
 <body>  
 </body>  
 </html>

How to call HTML web resource

Add the navigation link to the form. The navigation link properties dialog will look like the following screen shot.
Choose the name for the navigation link.
Select an icon for the link.
Select “External URL” instead of using the web resource. Use the relative path for the web resource and pass the relationship name as query string parameter as shown in the screen shot above.
Save and publish the changes and test the solution.

There you go now you can use the same HTML resource to add as many missing associated views as you want.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Step by step tutorial to add the missing associated views to a CRM form.

In my last blog, I have posted the URL to add the navigation link for the relationships missing in the relationship explorer. I was in a hurry and did not explain how the URL can be used to add associated view to the form navigation. This blog will explain all the URL parameters and a step by step guide to achieve it.
URL Parameters
Here is the URL to display the associated view.
http://servername/orgname/userdefined/areas.aspx?oId=<guid of the entity>&oType=<entity type code>&pagemode=iframe&security=852023&tabSet=<relationship schema name>
The URL has following parameters

oId: This parameter represents the guid of the entity opened in the form.
oType: This parameter represents the entity type (object type code) of the entity
pagemode: This parameter is static. pagemode=iframe means that this view will be displayed like an iframe and there will be no ribbon displayed for this view. The system will display a context ribbon when user selects the associated view grid.
security: This parameter is also static. I am not changing this value.
tabSet: This parameter represents the schema name of the relationship.

Here are all the steps to add the associated view to the form navigation.

Create a HTML web resource. I named my web resource “AssociatedView.HTML”. Here is the code for the web resource.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
    <title>Untitled Page</title>
    <style type="text/css">html,body{font-family: Segoe UI, Tahoma, Arial;background-color: #d6e8ff;border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;}</style>
    <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

            //debugger;

            //get the context
            var Xrm = window.parent.Xrm;

            //get the current object id
            var oId = Xrm.Page.data.entity.getId();

            //get the object type
            var oType = Xrm.Page.context.getQueryStringParameters().etc;

            //set Relationship Name
            var relName = "lead_owning_user";

            //building a url
            var sUrl = "/userdefined/areas.aspx?oId=" + oId + "&oType=" + oType + "&pagemode=iframe&security=852023&tabSet=" + relName;

           
            //get relative path with orgname as required
            var relativeUrl = Xrm.Page.context.prependOrgName(sUrl);
            
            window.location = relativeUrl;
   
    </script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

The only thing you need to change is the relationship name field. To do that open the entity relationships and get the schema name of the relationship. The following screen shot is displaying the relationship between user and lead entity. The user can be the owner of multiple leads.
Update the JavaScript in the HTML web resource. Save and publish the web resource.
Open the entity form and click on navigation button. Then select the “navigation link” as shown in the following screen short.
The system will display the “Navigation Link Properties” dialog as shown in above screen shot. Enter the name for the navigation link. Choose an Icon and choose the web resource created in step 1 of the tutorial. Save the changes and publish the form.
Open the form. The result will look like the following screen.

Happy 2013 everyone.