Monday, February 1, 2010

CRM Relationship Behavior (contd) - Cascading rule for Relationship Behavior

We had written on CRM Entity Relationships in one of our earlier post on this blog. To take this further today we would like to discuss the way the settings for the Cascading Rules affect the related entities when an action is performed on the main entity.

Cascading Rules:

Following action can be taken on the parent entity
- Assign
- Delete
- Merge
- Reparent
- Share
- Unshare
The cascading rules let you decide the action to be taken on the child entities when any of the above action is taken on the Parent. This helps you decide how to handle the child entities and if you want them to behave differently than the parent entity.

Say suppose you want Delete the parent entity, what action should be taken for the related child entities. Ideally you may want the child to be deleted along with the parent. But sometimes you may want it otherwise. You want to keep the child entities and delete the association with the Parent. You can define this using the cascading rules.

The following options are available.

Cascade All:
Perform the action on the primary entity as well as related entity.
e.g. if an account is assign to another user from current user then all its related contact will get assigned to the new user.

Cascade None:
Perform the action on the primary entity but not on the related entity.
e.g. if we delete a contact and do not want to delete the activity related to the contact, use Cascade None.

Cascade Active:
Perform the action on the primary entity. Also it performs the action on related entities which are active or open.
e.g. If we delete an account from CRM, using this rule we can avoid the deletion of related invoice and orders.

Cascade User-Owned:
Perform the action on the primary entity. It performs the action on cascade entity only if the related entity has same owner as that of the primary entity.
e.g. We can delete all the contacts related to an account which have the same owner and leave others untouched using this rule.

Remove Link:
Perform the action on the primary entity and remove the link of related entity. Do not perform any action on the related entity.
e.g. If we want to just delete the account and remove the link of account from contact, we can use this rule.

Restrict:
Perform the action only and only if no related entity exists. If any related entity exists the action is cancelled. This rule is applied on “Delete” action only.
e.g. If we don’t want to allow user to delete an account having any contact then we can use this rule to disallow user from performing “Delete” operation.

Understanding the way the relationships work goes a long way in working with Dynamics CRM. It helps you provide simple solutions to seemingly tough tasks.

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Posted by: Inogic
For more information/discussions (documents, sample code snippets, detailed work flow or diagrams),
Please be free to visit the following links or email us:
Web: http://www.inogic.com
Blog: http://inogic.blogspot.com
Email: news@inogic.com
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Monday, January 25, 2010

InoDashboard – Dynamics CRM Business Intelligence Dashboard released

Dynamics CRM requires a comprehensive tool for monitoring the KPI in a visual/dashboard format. Inogic labs has come up with InoDashboard, a Business Intelligence Dashboard designed for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to fill in this gap. This tool will allow the CRM users at each level to design a dashboard specific to them and include the reports and monitor areas specific to their interest.

It comes along with a pre-packaged bundle of about 40+ reports that provide you with the most commonly requested reports for monitoring the KPI. Whats more is that with the wizard kind of UI it is very easy to develop your own custom reports/charts with basic knowledge of writing SQL queries. The Dashboard can be seen as below screen shot.


Its feature set includes

  • Easy to create reports to analyze your CRM data.
  • No learning curve required. Use your SQL query writing skills to design reports.

  • Ability to add CRM reports, views, custom website URL
  • User personalization available.
  • Secured reports. Pre-defined reports use Filtered Views to force inbuilt CRM security.
  • Ability to drill down to CRM entity forms.

Technical details

  • It is developed using .NET Chart control for designing the various charts
  • It makes extensive use of Web parts to support personalization
  • It supports the following types of charts shown in the screen shot.

  • It supports Dynamics CRM 4.0 On-premise with IFD

  • We have come up with this after a lot of research in this area some of our r n d was put up in our earlier blogs http://inogic.blogspot.com/search/label/Dashboards where we studied the various ways in which a dashboard could be presented in Dynamics CRM.

    Wednesday, January 13, 2010

    Increasing the length of address1_line1 attribute does not work - FIX

    We once happened to increase the length of the adress1_line1 attribute of account to 200. We had done this before with other attributes and it had worked just fine.

    So we were surprised when even after publishing the account entity after make the above change, we still received an error.

    To Fix this Error we had to instead increase the length of line1 attribute of the “customeraddress” entity and publish this entity.

    Once the above change was published we did not receive any more errors related to street1 attribute on the account entity.

    Monday, January 11, 2010

    Change left navigation lable ,display order on custom entity

    This blog will help you to customize your left navigation pane settings found on entity record. Like shown in below screen shot. You can change the order as well as label shown over here but note that this functionality will only apply on custom entity and not on system entity.

    This is CRM functionality where you can change the display label and order of the list on the left navigation. Following below steps for this:

    - Go to Settings --> Customization --> Customize entities and open the entity of which the related entities label you need to change. (see below the screen) here we have displayed changes in the account-opportunity bid.


    - Go to 1:n relationships and open the related entity and find “Navigation pane item for primary entity” section on page (see below the screen).


    - In this section you have see four fields as follows:
    o Display Option: In this fields contain three option select “Use Custom label”.
    o Custom label: Enter your text
    o Display area : Select the display area such as details, Service, sales , marketing .
    o Display Order: Enter order number which is set the order of the displayed list.
    - After that publish it and open the record and check the changes.

    Thursday, January 7, 2010

    Debugging Script with CRM events

    Writing JavaScript in CRM is a tedious job and finding the error in your script is even more difficult. The best way to find the error cause is to debug it. The blog will give you the steps to debug the scripts added on form events in CRM.

    Steps to enable debugging script:

    - Go to Internet Explorer settings.
    - Click on Tools and select Internet Options. You will we see following screen.


    - On the Advanced Tab, under Browsing find the Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer) option and uncheck it.
    - In the script use “Debugger”, just before the statement where you want to start your debugging session.
    - For example: you can write script under the CRM events such as onLoad, Onsave etc.
    debugger;
    //after start to write script
    - After add script ,save it and publish. Refresh the page, you will see following screen.


    - Select new instance of visual studio 2008/2005 and click on yes. After this open script code on visual studio for debugging mode where you can debug own script. (See below the screen)