NEW YEAR

It’s a new year. I haven’t been bloging for some time. There are some things that I want to publish here, but couldn’t do it as there was not much time for me. Hoping to publish more information regarding CRM 3.0 and CRM 4.0 in the future.

Hope that this New Year brings happiness and joy to all of you out there.

Retreiving Link Entitiy attributes from CRM 3.0

We have 2 methods to retreive information from CRM.

1. Using Fetch Statements
2. Using QueryExpressions

although we can use to join entities in queryexpression we cannot use it to retreive link entity attributes. we need to use Fetch statements to do this task.

Also if we are trying to retreive more then one link entities attributes from a fetch statement we need to use alias, else the fecth statements will not be executed properly. below you can find an example.

Hiding links from the left pane of an entity

When we log in to CRM what we see is the application navigation area. This can be modified using site map xml file. but the tricky thing is when it comes to entity navigation pane we cannot use the site map. we have to use the ISV.Config file or use javascripts at the from onload event.

For a project that we are currently doing we have used javascripts to hide the unwanted links when the entity form is loading. The thing is the links are getting hidden after the form is getting loaded, hence the user is able to see some of the items when the form is loading. But as people say something is better then nothing. this was a blessing in disguise to us.

Please keep in mind you need to get the id's of the the links that you need to hide after they gets rendered to the page. you can open up a new form with this facility by clicking ctrl+N button and a new page will be opened of the form with the view source functionality.

i was abled to find this solution from microsoft.crm developer community. i cant remember the link. but would like to say "thanks guys for publishing the solution".

you can use the following javascript to hide the unwanted links.
var LeftBar = new Array() ;
LeftBar [0] = "navHistory";
LeftBar [1] = "navContacts";
LeftBar [2] = "navMoreAddresses";
for (i=0;i
{
try
{
document.getElementById(myLeftBar[i]).style.display='none';
}
catch(err)
{}
}

Hiding of Owner field froma crm form

We needed to hide the ownerid from a crm form. we tried using crmForm.all.ownerid.style.display ="none";

This was partially working as the fields look up button was hidden, but didn't hide the entire field.

Then we used
crmForm.all.ownerid_d.style.display ="none"; and it worked.

Also when tried to hide a tab we had to wait till it gets rendered and then take the id of the tab.

Quick Create form for custom entites

Recently in one of our projects we needed to the new button(so that user can create records from the look up easily) in the look up for a custom entity. This is not supported in CRM 3.0 for custom entites.

So i had to find another way to do this. I did what we do best for solutions in the net. Lucky for me i found a method in stunnware. although it's not what we wanted exactly i think we could live with that for now.

You can also find this article here.
http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=js10

Thanks a lot Michael Höhne. You saved my day..

New CRM Virtual Machine

I recieved the downloaded version of the new CRM virtual machine from UK mother company yesturday. Since it was aroound 2.2 GB it was hard for us to download it. Hence i got a copy from the UK.

There are so many new things that are attached with the new virtul server.

Can't wait to go through it.

Customizing CRM Session

Today our company did a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 presentation to the sri lankan dotnet community. The presentation was conducted by myself and one of my collegues (and a team leader of our company) Lolitha.

We explained a bit about what is CRM, why use CRM and the benefites of using Microsoft CRM. then we moved on to customization of CRM. we did a basic intro and did some demo session regarding entity, form and view customizations.

Hope the presenation was good and the audience were able to understand what we spoke about.

Cheers to us.