Posted in ASP.NET on November 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »
<script>
function getQueryVariable(variable) {
var query = window.location.search.substring(1);
var vars = query.split(“&”);
for (var i=0;i<vars.length;i++) {
var pair = vars[i].split(“=”);
if (pair[0] == variable) {
return pair[1];
}
}
}
</script>
<script>
alert( getQueryVariable(“QueryString”) );
</script>
Posted in ASP.NET on November 18, 2008| 1 Comment »
So <iframe height="100%"> doesn’t make an iframe fill all the remaining portion of a window like you might expect. I found several places where people showed how they got it to resize with javascript, but those didn’t work for me. The DOM properties that they used were frequently the “page” height (e.g. 250px for a short content page, 1300px for a tall page that has scrolling) or something else wrong. Here is what works for me (in Firefox 2 and IE 7) to make an iframe be as high as possible without causing the main window to have scrolling:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
<html>
<head>Test Page</head>
<body>
<h1>Check out the cool page below</h1>
<p><a href=”/”>Go back home</a></p>
<iframe id=”frame” src=”http://google.com/” width=”100%” frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″></iframe>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
function resizeIframe() {
var height = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
height -= document.getElementById(‘frame’).offsetTop;
// not sure how to get this dynamically
height -= 20; /* whatever you set your body bottom margin/padding to be */
document.getElementById(‘frame’).style.height = height +”px”;
};
document.getElementById(‘frame’).onload = resizeIframe;
window.onresize = resizeIframe;
</script>
Posted in CRM 4.0 on November 17, 2008| 2 Comments »
First off, I want to give a big thank you to Jeremy Winchell for writing up the post that got me started in the right direction for this solution.
For those of you that customize Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, like I do, then likely one of the things you repeatedly run into is clients and users that need to have better names for their actions. Changing these names on the main navigation page relatively simple, but what about on all the other pages, like Contacts, Accounts, etc.? These, for whatever reason Microsoft had, aren’t removable or changeable. It’s a really painful oversight to have to tell a client that even though you have renamed “Products” to “Hardware”, they’re going to have to remember that it’s still going to be “Products” in a few places. Hopefully the next version of CRM will have the capability to alter and remove these natively, but until then, we’ll have to roll our own.
Warning, the following actions are not supported or even documented by Microsoft. Use at your own risk.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let’s take a look at the meat of the solution. First, go to the customization area of the Entity you want to change, and open its form view. In there, click Form Properties and enable JavaScript for the OnLoad action. The link above has pictures if you’re not sure how to get there.
Now you will need the JavaScript:
document.getElementById(“%variableName%”).style.display = “none”
So in this line, %variableName% is the variable related to the button on the left-hand nav. “none” will hide this element entirely. (Also, make sure if you copy and paste that you don’t end up with retarded Word-style quotes. That happened to me and I spent 10 minutes trying to find a typo in my code)
If you want to change the display name of a button, then you have a bit more work to do.
Again, the JavaScript:
document.getElementById(“%variableName%”).innerHTML= “<img src=\”%imageLocation%\” /> %displayName%”;
Here, you will see that we’re using innerHTML to actually change the content of that button. Now you don’t have to have the image code in here, but if you leave it out, then your link won’t have an image anymore, and will just be text. If you want to keep the image, the best thing I have found is to use the IE Dev Toolbar and then look at that button’s properties (to get the IE Dev toolbar on a popup screen, hit Ctrl+N). You will see the link to the default image there. This is going to be different for every CRM install, so I have not included it on the table below. Then just change the Display Name with whatever you want the button to actually say, and you’re set! Note that the quotes around the image location have to be escaped.
Below is a list of the links, their variable names, and their default Title. From there, making changes to the left nav of any entity in CRM should be simple. You will see repeats of some. The reason for that is because MS was not 100% internally consistent in its naming scheme. For example, Cases is IDed by both navService and navCases, depending on where you are. For those, I would either try both, or check on the screen itself.
|
Link |
Link ID Name |
Default Title |
|
Activities |
navActivities |
View Activities |
|
Campaign Activities |
navCampaignActivities |
View Campaign Activities |
|
Campaign Responses |
navCampaignResponses |
View Campaign Responses |
|
Campaigns |
navCampaignsInSFA |
View Campaigns |
|
Campaigns |
navCampaignsInList |
View Campaigns |
|
Cases |
navService |
View Cases |
|
Cases |
navCases |
View Cases |
|
Competitors |
navComp |
View Competitors |
|
Competitors |
navComps |
View Competitors |
|
Contacts |
navContacts |
View Contacts |
|
Contacts Excluded |
navBulkOperationFailures |
View Contacts Excluded |
|
Contacts Selected |
navTargetedMembers |
View Contacts Selected |
|
Contract Lines |
navContractLines |
View Contract Lines |
|
Contracts |
navContracts |
View Contracts |
|
Documents |
navDoc |
View Documents |
|
E-mail Messages Created |
navBulkOperationSuccesses |
View E-mail Messages Created |
|
Existing Products |
navExistingProducts |
View Existing Products |
|
History |
navActivityHistory |
View History |
|
Information |
navInfo |
View general information about this record |
|
Invoices |
navInvoices |
View Invoices |
|
Marketing List Members |
navListMember |
View Marketing List Members |
|
Marketing Lists |
navListsInSFA |
View Marketing Lists |
|
More Addresses |
navAddresses |
More Addresses |
|
Opportunities |
navOpps |
View Opportunities |
|
Orders |
navOrders |
View Orders |
|
Other Contacts |
navContacts |
View Other Contacts |
|
Planning Tasks |
navTasks |
View Planning Tasks |
|
Price List Items |
navPrices |
View Price List Items |
|
Products |
navProducts |
View Products |
|
Quick Campaigns |
navMiniCampaignsForList |
View QuickCampaigns |
|
Quotes |
navQuotes |
View Quotes |
|
Related Campaigns |
navCampaigns |
View Related Campaigns |
|
Relationships |
navRelationship |
View Relationships |
|
Sales Literature |
navCollaterals |
View Sales Literature |
|
Sales Literature |
navSalesLit |
View Sales Literature |
|
Sub-Accounts |
navSubAct |
View Sub-Accounts |
|
Sub-Contacts |
navSubContacts |
View Sub-Contacts |
|
Substitutes |
navSubs |
View Substitutes |
|
Target Marketing Lists |
navTargetLists |
View Target Marketing Lists |
|
Target Products |
navTargetProducts |
View Target Products |
|
Workflows |
navAsyncOperations |
View Workflows |
|
Write-In Products |
navWriteInProducts |
View Write-In Products |
So now you should have all the tools you need to customize the Entity Screens into something useful for your clients and users. And don’t forget, if you break something, you can always just delete the JavaScript and start over.
Posted in CRM 4.0 on November 14, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Here’s a very quick overview of how to debug your OnLoad, OnSave and OnChange event scripts:
Open the Internet Explorer settings and select the Advanced tab. In the list of available options find the “Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)” setting and make sure it’s unchecked.
Open any script you want to debug and place the following just before the statement where you want to start your debugging session:
Like any other statement, you can simply comment out the debugger statement, so
//debugger
will actually turn off debugging.
All users that have not unchecked the “Disable debugging” setting in IE will not be prompted to start a debugger. However, you should make sure that you remove these statements before publishing them to a production environment. The easiest way to ensure it is to export all customizations and search the export xml file for “debugger”.
Posted in ASP.NET on November 12, 2008| Leave a Comment »
In no particular order, here are the top ten things I’ve learned to pay attention to when dealing with production ASP.NET applications. Hopefully they will help you save you some time and headaches. As always, your thoughts and additions are welcome.
When moving an application to production for the first time it is a good idea to generate new encryption keys. This includes the machine validation key and decryption key as well as any other custom keys your application may be using. There is an article on CodeProject that talks about generating machineKeys specifically that should be helpful with this.
This includes both the connection string and machine key sections. See Scott Guthrie’s post for some good references. Note that if your application runs in a clustered environment you will need to share a custom key using the RSA provider as described in an MSDN article.
Both Barry Dorrans and Alex Chang have articles which discuss this in detail.
When setting up your new site for the first time do not share an existing application pool. Create a new application pool which will be used by only by the new web application.
When creating the application pool, specifically set the memory limit rather than the time limit which is set by default. Asp.net has a good whitepaper which explains the value of this:
By default IIS 6.0 does not set a limit on the amount of memory that IIS is allowed to use. ASP.NET’s Cache feature relies on a limitation of memory so the Cache can proactively remove unused items from memory.
It is recommended that you configure the memory recycling feature of IIS 6.0.
There are many benefits to using this file. It provides an easy way to take your application offline in a somewhat user friendly way (you can at least have a pretty explanation) while fixing critical issues or pushing a major update. It also forces an application restart in case you forget to do this for a deployment. Once again, ScottGu is the best source for more information on this.
It is way too easy to make mistakes when deploying any type of software. This is especially the case with software that uses configuration files that may be different between the development, staging, or production environments. I would argue that the process you come up with is not nearly as important as it being easily repeatable and automated. You can fine tune the process as needed, but you don’t want a simple typo to bring a site down.
In addition to making sure ASP.NET is not configured in debug mode, also make sure that your assemblies are not debug assemblies. There are of course exceptions if you are trying to solve a unique issue in your production environment … but in most cases you should always deploy with release builds for all assemblies.
This goes without saying. Inevitably, good load testing will uncover threading and memory issues not otherwise considered.
Posted in ASP.NET on November 11, 2008| Leave a Comment »
We will use an ActiveX Object from the Scripting.FileSystemObject library to read and write files from JavaScript, which knows how to handle files. The parameter of the OpenTextFile function can be (read = 1, write = 2, append = 8).And here are the scripts:
Reading a File:
function ReadFile()
{
var FileOpener = new ActiveXObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”);
var FilePointer = FileOpener.OpenTextFile(”C:\\siva.txt”, 1, true);
FileContents = FilePointer.ReadAll(); // we can use FilePointer.ReadAll() to read all the lines
alert(FileContents);
FilePointer.Close();
}
Writing to File:
function WriteFile
{
var FileOpener = new ActiveXObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”);
var FilePointer = FileOpener.OpenTextFile(”C:\\siva.txt”, 8, true);
FilePointer.WriteLine(”I m a good boy”);
FilePointer.Close();
}
Note:
Go to Tools >> Internet Options >> Security, add page to Trusted sites >> then go to Custom level… and look for Initialize and script ActiveX controls. Enable it and restart the Internet Explorer.
Posted in CRM 4.0 on November 5, 2008| 1 Comment »
Entity relationships of MS CRM 4.0
1. One-to-Many System-System (1:n)In CRM 4.0 you can link system entity to another system entity. The child system entity has a lookup field to associate it with a parent system entity.
2. Self-Referential
In CRM 4.0 you can link An entity to itself. For example a Case can be linked to a master Case.
3. Multiple Relationships Between Entities
Many of you know about mulitple lookups issues with same entity, now it can be achieved in MS CRM 4.0 e.g the Account entity might have two relationships with a Contact entity – a primary and secondary Contact.
4. Many-to-Many System-System, System-Custom & Custom-Custom (n:n)
In CRM 4.0 this is major requirement for many to many relationship, now it is possible . Not only will this remove the need to build a “joining” entity, but you have control over how the relationships show up in the UI.
Posted in CRM 4.0 on November 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »
You can increase size of attachment in MS CRM. by default it is 5mb.
1. Open the web.config of MS CRM
2. Locate httpRuntime the key within the element and change the values to the following:
httpRuntime executionTimeout=”9999″ maxRequestLength=”10240″
3. Locate httpRuntime the key within the element of the element, and change it to the following:
httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”10240″
save the web.config and restart IIS.
Regards,
Siva
Posted in CRM 4.0 on November 3, 2008| 3 Comments »
Did you know you can save a record by pressing ALT + S on the keyboard? There are many convenient keyboard shortcuts that you can use to speed up your work. Keyboard shortcuts can even be more ergonomic than using your mouse in some cases. In addition to common shortcuts, such as CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste, here are 10 keyboard shortcuts you may find useful.
| Top 10 keyboard shortcuts | |
| To do this | Press |
|
Select all text in the current field or current list |
CTRL+A |
|
Close an active form |
ALT+F4 |
|
Move forward through a form’s fields |
TAB |
|
Move backward through a form’s fields |
SHIFT+TAB |
|
Save a form |
CTRL+S or SHIFT+F12 |
|
Save and close a form |
ALT + S |
|
Expand/collapse Form Assistant |
CTRL+SHIFT+F |
|
Cancel edits and close a form |
ESCAPE |
|
Delete a record |
CTRL+D |
|
Save and then open a new form |
CTRL+SHIFT+S |
For more keyboard shortcuts, search the Microsoft CRM online Help for “keyboard shortcuts.”
You can also use keyboard shortcuts to zip around the Microsoft CRM client for Outlook folders in Microsoft Office Outlook. Although there are no shortcuts available that are specific to Microsoft CRM client for Outlook, here are the top ten Outlook shortcuts that I find useful.
| Top 10 Outlook keyboard shortcuts | |
| To do this | Press |
|
Switch to Mail |
CTRL+1 |
|
Switch to Inbox |
CTRL+SHIFT+I |
|
Switch to Outlook Calendar |
CTRL+2 |
|
Switch to Outlook Contacts |
CTRL+3 |
|
Switch to Outlook Tasks |
CTRL+4 |
|
Display the Address Book |
CTRL+SHIFT+B |
|
Create a new Appointment |
CTRL+SHIFT+A |
|
Create a new Contact |
CTRL+SHIFT+C |
|
Create a new Task |
CTRL+SHIFT+K |
|
Check Spelling |
F7 |
For more Outlook shortcuts, in the Type question for Help box, type “Outlook keyboard shortcuts”.
The shortcut keys described here refer to the U.S. keyboard layout. Keys on other layouts might not correspond exactly to the keys on a U.S. keyboard.
Siva Vadavalli Weblog 