How to edit the list of entities displayed in the Look for picklist in Lookup window

The regarding lookup windows generally displays a list of all entities that can be associated with an activity. Quite often this feature becomes quite an issue with the users always having to select the appropriate entity from the list before applying the search. The longer the list of entities the more time consuming it is to search using the lookup window.

It would be a boon to have only a selected few listed that you use and do away with the rest. Well this is not available for customization through the CRM customization area. But it could be done with a couple of lines of script added to the onload of the form to manipulate the default properties of a lookup control to get the desired results.

For better understanding of how this works, it would be good to check the source of one of the CRM form that has a lookup control. In our example we are using the source of the Email form. Here when you search for regardingobjectid, you will find the “Lookup Types”, “Lookup Type names” ,”Lookup Type Icons” and “default type” properties of the Lookup control being set.

This provides the list of the entities that shall be displayed in the Look for entity list. To edit this to set your specific list of entities to show up in the Look for section you need to set these properties appropriately through scripting.

//Give the entity type code that you want in below script we want to show account, contact, contract and order in the list //codes
crmForm.all.regardingobjectid.lookuptypes = "1,2,1010,1088";

//Make sure you set the path of the entity images correctly for the list specified above. If you notice it is generally in the form of /imgs_ico_16_
crmForm.all.regardingobjectid.lookuptypeIcons = "/_imgs/ico_16_1.gif:/_imgs/ico_16_2.gif: :/_imgs/ico_16_1010.gif : :/_imgs/ico_16_1088.gif ";

//The below script is to set default entity in the multiple entity lookup. Here we set the default entity to be contact. If you want contract then write 1010 in place of 2 in //below script
crmForm.all.regardingobjectid.defaulttype = "2";

You need to add the above 3 lines of code in the onload event of the email form and publish it. Next time the lookup window for regarding will only list the 4 entities listed above.