Thought of the day ( August 8th, 2009 )

On August 25, 2009, in Meanderings, by Mitch Milam

I passed a guy on the freeway yesterday in an early 90’s model Toyota van missing a hub-cap on the front-left rim and doing just a hair over 70mph.

With the windows down and an outside temperature of 96 degrees, I’m sure the A/C was out and that he wasn’t just going for a nice quiet ride in the country.

Wearing a faded baseball cap and smoking a Marlboro, the two-handed death grip he had on the wheel rather led me to believe that he was going to ride her down to the end – whenever and wherever that might be.

0 Comments
Leave A Response

 

Changing CRM’s Customization Navigation

On August 25, 2009, in Customization, Dynamics CRM, by Mitch Milam

If you’re like me and spend much of your day importing, exporting, and publishing customizations, you’re probably a bit tired of some of the excess clicking required to accomplish those processes.

I dedicated a bit of time yesterday researching how I could move the main Customize, Export, and Import functions from the Customization page to the left-hand navigation so that these functions could be accessed with a single click.  Here’s what I came up with:

clip_image002

This is all done using modifications to the CRM Site Map.

 

Step 1

The first step in this process is modifying the Settings area and adding the ShowGroups option, as shown below:

<Area Id="Settings" 
      ResourceId="Area_Settings" 
      Icon="/_imgs/settings_24x24.gif" 
      DescriptionResourceId="Settings_Area_Description" 
      ShowGroups="true">

 

Step 2:

We need to add a new Group containing the new navigation items.  It should look something like this:

<Group Id="m3_customizations">
  <Titles>
    <Title LCID="1033" Title="Customizations"/>
  </Titles>
  <Descriptions>
    <Description LCID="1033" Description="CRM Customization Functions"/>
  </Descriptions>
  <SubArea Id="m3_customize"
           Icon="/_imgs/SystemCustomization/ico_entityManagement.gif"
           Url="http://crm/contoso/tools/systemcustomization/systemcustomization.aspx?pid=01"
           AvailableOffline="false">
    <Titles>
      <Title LCID="1033" Title="Customize Entitites"/>
    </Titles>
    <Descriptions>
      <Description LCID="1033" Description="Customize Entities"/>
    </Descriptions>
  </SubArea>
  <SubArea Id="m3_exportcustomizations"
           Icon="/_imgs/SystemCustomization/ico_exportCustomizations.gif"
           Url="http://crm/contoso/tools/systemcustomization/systemcustomization.aspx?pid=02"
           AvailableOffline="false">
    <Titles>
      <Title LCID="1033" Title="Export Customizations"/>
    </Titles>
    <Descriptions>
      <Description LCID="1033" Description="Export Customizations"/>
    </Descriptions>
  </SubArea>
  <SubArea Id="m3_importcustomizations"
           Icon="/_imgs/SystemCustomization/ico_importCustomizations.gif"
           Url="http://crm/contoso/tools/systemcustomization/systemcustomization.aspx?pid=03"
           AvailableOffline="false">
    <Titles>
      <Title LCID="1033" Title="Import Customizations"/>
    </Titles>
    <Descriptions>
      <Description LCID="1033" Description="Import Customizations"/>
    </Descriptions>
  </SubArea>
</Group>

The new Customizations Group contains three subareas: Customize, Export and Import.  Each points to the URL that handles that specific function within CRM.  This is the same URL that CRM uses, we’ve just moved it into the navigation structure.

 

Caveats

The only real issue that I have with this solution is you must specify the full URL to these sites.  I tried a relative path but it would not display properly.  This is an issue if you are moving customizations between servers and/or organizations but it’s not a huge issue to overcome.

You’ll also notice that I only moved three of the six items on the Customization page.  The other three items are used so infrequently that they don’t warrant occupying space within the navigation structure.

5 Comments
Leave A Response