A Devotee of Dynamics CRM

Monday, 30 May 2011

CRM 2011: Change sitemap customization

Recently I worked upon a project where in I required updating the sitemap customization to have altogether new areas to be replaced with the default CRM areas and subareas of sitemap. I found some interesting things while doing such customization changes, so I would like to share the same here in this post.

1. You can give a title to areas and the subareas, suppose I want to change the title of default Sales area from Sales to “Property Sales”, just add a title attribute as shown below.

The same attribute could be added for any of the subareas to have different titles.

2. Setup the custom entity as subarea link,

As shown above, you can setup the custom entity as link. Only the Id is the required attribute. This will show the default view of an entity on click of the above link.

Note: You can use either URL or Entity while setup a custom entity link, if by mistake you keep both the attributes in any of subarea, your CRM server will crash, and you could not browse anything for that particular organization. Also you cannot revert back as there is no “Settings” area available to be browsed now. So I would suggest you to have backup of your database before you import the updated sitemap customization/solution.

Visit below link to know more about the rest of the attributes of subarea.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328498.aspx

3. Use the character entity reference, decimal character reference, and hexadecimal character reference for markup-significant and internationalization characters, as well as the rendering of such characters in your browser.

For example, suppose you want a subarea title as “Sales, Marketing & Services”. Use “&” entity in place of ‘&’ character. So now your title will be “Sales, Marketing & Services”.

Visit below link for more help.

http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/special.html

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Deselect, remove or exclude the associated systemuser entity record(s)

Whenever you have 1:N relationship with systemuser entity, you will not be able to delete or remove the systemuser record from Users associated view. It is by design. So to remove that you must have a lookup attribute of related entity on your systemuser form and need to delete that record from lookup and save the form. Let's understand with an example.

Suppose I have 1:N relationship between Marketing List and systemuser entities. So now I have Users associated view in left navigation of Marketing list record. Let's add an existing user for this marketing list record. There is no direct way to remove, delete or exclude the added user record. So for deselecting this user record we could have a lookup of Marketing list entity on systemuser form. Add the Marketing list lookup attribute on systemuser form, publish it. Now back to Users associated view, double click the user record, delete the marketing list record from the lookup on user form. It will refresh the parent grid and removes the user record.

I hope this will be helpful.