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.

Using IE Developer tool to extract information from CRM forms.

CRM forms use lots of stylesheets to design their forms. It can be a very tough job to be able to design a custom form with the same look as that of standard CRM Forms. IE developer tool can be of great help in getting you closer to be being able to design similar looking forms.

The tool is made available by Microsoft and it help you to review the properties and stylesheet of specific element of the pages being displayed in your IE browser.

Once you install the tool it would be available on the IE standard toolbar as shown below.

Clicking on this button will show up the tool IDE with all the information. It is more organized way of what we get after view source.

If need to know properties (id/stylesheet info) of any field, area, left nav on form then choose select element option

Now select your field/region/area and its details shall be displayed like the color, id, css class names etc…

For the images you could get the control source

To get the URL of the left nav options

Stylesheet classes applied

Working with Volume Discounts in Dynamics CRM

Though CRM is not an accounting system, it has worked towards coming pretty close to working as Quoting solution as well. It has incorporated the concept of Discount lists that is widely available in accounting systems to enable Volume discounting.

There are two types of Discount List that can be created in Dynamics CRM (i.e. Percentage OR Currency Amount. As shown in the below screenshot.


Discount lists is available under Product Catalog. You can create your discount list and add the various qty brackets for volume discounts as shown below.


As shown in the above screenshot, this discount is applied only when this item is ordered for the specified # of qty provided in the Discount bracket above.

So if you purchase 5 units of an item with its Price Per Unit = $100 and per unit Discount available would be $10 so the calculation would be
Qty = 5
Price per unit = $100
Total Price = $500
Volume Discount = $10
Total Discount = $50
Amount = $450

To apply the discount for a product you need to associate the discount list with the appropriate price list. Unless this association is made, no discounts shall be calculated.

Designing Simple Dashboards with .NET ASP Chart Controls and web parts

In our last post, we had explained how we could integrate SRS reports in Web Parts and make a user friendly Dashboard easily.

The Dashboard work just great… but on the presentation front, SRS report is not that flexible and it takes up a lot of space with the additional toolbars that the Reportviewer bring along. Yes there are few options that can be passed along in the querystring to hide these additional toolbars but then it doesn’t seem to work across all versions.

You must have come across a number of third party chart tools that help you create fancy looking charts. We decided to use the freely available .NET Chart controls available from Microsoft. Today we explain how we could use these controls to make easy to use and fancy looking charts that can be integrated in the webparts to enhance our Dashboard.

.NET charts enable you to design various types of charts

Area FastLine Pyramid SplineArea Bar FastPoint Radar SplineRange

BoxPlot Funnel Polar StackedArea Bubble Kagi Range StackedArea100

CandleStick Line RangeBar StackedBar Column Pie RangeColumn StackedBar100

Doughnut Point Renko StepLine ThreeLineBreak PointAndFigure Spline Stock

Lets pickup a simple column chart example that shows Won/Lost Opportunity comparison by Sales Rep.

1. The first step is to design the SQL query to retrieve the required information. We would need to design the query to return the result in the following table format

Sales Rep Won Opp $ Lost Opp $

2. So we have 2 series that need to plotted the Won Opp series and the Lost Opp series. The two series would be assigned to the Y-Axis. The Sales Rep being on the X-axis.

3. Once you have the query ready and you have decided on the X and Y axis series, you just have to go ahead and set these as the chart properties.

// Set chart data source
chart1.DataSource = myCommand;

//Set the Chart Type
chart1.Series["Series 1"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType.Column;
chart1.Series["Series 2"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType. Column;

// Set series members names for the X and Y values
chart1.Series["Series 1"].XValueMember = "Sales Rep";
chart1.Series["Series 1"].YValueMembers = "Won Opp $";
chart1.Series["Series 2"].YValueMembers = "Lost Opp $";

// Data bind to the selected data source
chart1.DataBind();

The ValueMember above needs to refer to a column of the SQL query designed.

Note: If you wanted this to be a Bar chart instead… no fuss just change the chart type of series to bar chart

chart1.Series["Series 1"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType.Bar;
chart1.Series["Series 2"]. ChartType = SeriesChartType.Bar;

4. Placing a chart control on a web form and binding it with the data as explained above, you should have a web page ready that displays a fancy looking chart ready.
5. Next step would be to add the URL to this page in your Web part Dashboard and voila you have integrated this with Web Parts as well and now you can benefit from the features of both the tools.

Hope you get going!!!

Designing Simple Dashboards with SRS reports and web parts

At the very basic level, you can design an HTML page with multiple IFRAMES added. Each IFRAME includes the path to the SRS report or one of the CRM views or another html page, probably the URL of a another website… You can place the IFRAME in an HTML table and design the layout of your Dashboard.

<html>
<body bgcolor="#E3EFFF" leftmargin="0" topmargin="0">
<table border ="1">
<tr height="100%">
<td>
<iframe height="550" width="500" src="http://ad01/ReportServer?%2fINOGIC_MSCRM%2f4.0%2f%7bec3b0bf7-0ab5-dc11-94ac-000c29b366df%7d&rs:Command=Render" />
</td>
<td>
<iframe height="550" width="300" src="http://ad01:5555/Inogic/_root/homepage.aspx?etc=4&viewid=00000000-0000-0000-00aa-000010001006" />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

And

The issue with this one could be that it is a static dashboard and the users do not have much control over the presentation.

This can be taken a step forward by giving more control to the user by using the concept of Web Parts.

Briefly the steps would be

1. Design a web form and add the Web Part Zone control. The Web Part Zone allows you to design the layout of your page i.e whether the reports added appear Horizontally aligned or Vertically aligned or a combination of both.

2. Once the layout is defined. You add the Web Part control. This control will hold your reports.

3. You can add an IFRAME within the Web Part and set the URL to the report/page that needs to be displayed.

The benefit of using Web Parts is that it stores the personalization information of each individual user automatically. So if the user had changed the position of one of the reports in the layout from the left to the right, this change is stored and next time when the user logs on their individual preference is read and displayed accordingly.

Additionally you can provide the drag and drop capabilities

Or even minimize one of the reports to save space.

Well designing Dashboards using web parts is definitely worth exploring further.