Support for Interaction Centric Forms within Unified Service Desk

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Unified Service Desk 2.1.0 is released now, and is available for download here. Among other things, this release is primarily focused on getting the same level of support for the CRM Interaction centric (IC) forms as it had for the CRM web client forms.

Before continuing on the Unified Service Desk support for IC forms, it would help to understand some important concepts about IC forms.

In This Post

Interaction Centric Forms: Introduction Configuration Experience Important considerations for changing the hosted control type to host interaction centric forms

Interaction Centric Forms: Introduction

IC forms are used by the Interactive Service Hub. Interactive Service Hub is a single page application, which means there are no popups and there is only one navigation stack irrespective of the number of browser instances where IC pages are loaded. This poses challenge when loaded in an application like Unified Service Desk, which relies on popup/multi page windows, and supports independent navigation stacks for each browser window hosted.

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In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Online Update 1 and CRM 2016 Service Pack 1 (on-premises) release, we updated Interactive Service Hub to support multiple navigation stacks and also support URL addressability to IC forms. This gives Unified Service Desk the ability to load IC forms inside a tab and make them participate in Unified Service Desk specific capabilities such as actions, events, sessions, and navigation rules.

NOTE: As we rely on the infrastructure support from Interactive Service Hub , this particular feature of Unified Service Desk is supported only in CRM 2016 Online Update 1 and CRM 2016 Service Pack 1 (on-premises) and later. Customers currently using Interactive Service Hub in an earlier versions of CRM won’t be able to take advantage of this feature.

Configuration Experience

The configuration experience for working with IC forms is similar to that of CRM web pages. A new hosted control type called Interactive Service Hub Page is available in Unified Service Desk 2.1.0 release, which provides similar actions and events as the CRM Page hosted control type. Changing type of a Unified Service Desk hosted control from CRM Page to Interactive Service Hub Page will make the hosted control load IC forms instead of the CRM web forms. Most of the actions of CRM Page hosted control type will work for Interactive Service Hub Page type, so changing the hosted control type will take care of most of the configuration changes automatically.

ISH Hosted Control

Important considerations for changing the hosted control type to host interaction centric forms

These are the few important changes you need to consider before changing your CRM Page type of hosted control instances to the Interactive Service Hub Page type.

  • GoBack action for Interactive Service Hub Page acts differently than CRM Page.

In the CRM Page hosted control, the GoBack action is effectively similar to window.history.back() JavaScript call or pressing the back button in the browser. In the Interactive Service Hub, pressing back on the browser or executing window.history.back() takes the user back to the main dashboard rather than the previous page on the navigation stack. There is a special back button in ISH that navigates to previous page on the navigation stack.

In the Interactive Service Hub Page hosted control, the GoBack action works similar to the back button within the Interactive Service Hub application until the navigation stack is empty and then switch to browser back functionality.

This is needed for the user to go back in the history, especially if they are navigating from non-Interactive Service Hub Page hosted control to an Interactive Service Hub Page hosted control.

  • The GoForward action for ISH page does not exist.

There is no concept of going forward in ISH and this action does not make any sense in the context of IC forms.

  • The PageLoadComplete event does not exist.

NOTE: You have to redefine your logic if you are using the PageLoadComplete event in your CRM Page hosted control (you should not be, unless you need to perform actions for specific frame), and want to change the type to the Interactive Service Hub Page hosted control .

The PageLoadComplete event of CRM Page control fires for each frame load of the CRM page. So, for each CRM record, this event fires multiple times with different URL and frame data. IC forms have different page construct than CRM web pages. They also load differently and not necessarily load by frames. So, the PageLoadComplete event does not make sense for IC forms.

  • The BrowserDocumentComplete event does not exist

The BrowserDocumentComplete is one of the most useful events of the CRM Page hosted control type. This event is fired when the CRM record is loaded completely and Unified Service Desk completes scanning the data on that page. Although this is extremely useful event, the name is quite misleading and will be changed in future for the CRM Page hosted control. The Interactive Service Hub Page control introduces a new event called DataReady which is effectively doing the same thing, but with more appropriate naming convention.

NOTE: When you change the type of a hosted control from CRM Page to Interactive Service Hub Page, you have to move any action calls configured for BrowserDocumentComplete to DataReady event.

  • Open_Crm_Page and New_Crm_Page actions on the Global Manager  hosted control will continue to open CRM web pages and there are no equivalent actions on Global Manager  to open IC forms.