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February 2-4, 2015, Seattle WA |
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Hear from Jujhar Singh, General Manager of Program Management for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, about why you should be a part of the Microsoft Dynamics Technical Conference.
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Time is running out: Register today for the Microsoft Dynamics Technical Conference!
See you in Seattle! |
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© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. |
I’m happy to share that Curt Kolcun, Vice President, U.S. Public Sector at Microsoft, has just blogged some great news! Check it out:
One of a few practices I see when people customize Dynamics CRM that usually comes back to haunt them during update rollups or upgrades is directly referencing the CSS files and classes that come with the product. It’s an innocent enough mistake, but the CSS files which ship with Dynamics CRM are intentionally not documented in the SDK. Directly referencing them is not supported. The Dynamics CRM team reserves the right to change them at any point, just like they reserve the right to change the structure of their html. That’s why direct HTML DOM manipulation of the UI the server creates isn’t supported either. Of course, you can manipulate the DOM of the web resources you author as much as you like. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. I am not aware of any product out there that shield you from future changes if you hardcode your extensibility code to html/css structures. So what should you do? Well, you should create your own CSS files which mimic the CRM look and feel and reference those from your web resources. That way, when anything changes with the Dynamics CRM codebase, you are shielded from any ripple effect. You’re customizations may look out of place if major colors or fonts change. However, if you structure your CSS right (i.e. don’t copy paste, reuse), then you should be able to adjust to those changes with less impact. Ok, but how? Here’s a great article from the Dynamics CRM in the Field blog which walks you through the fundamentals:
Scenario:
“I have a touchscreen. I want to capture a signature in a Dynamics CRM form. If the signature hasn’t been saved, then I want to allow a user to provide their signature. The next time the record is loaded, after the signature has been saved, I want to load an imagine of the signature to prevent ‘resigning’.”
This is a relatively simple thing with Dynamics CRM thanks to web resources and Xrm.Page. The general concept is to embed an html web resource in the form that captures the signature using the html5 canvas (preferably using an existing control vs. low level canvas programming). Before saving, you want to copy the data from the canvas control into a Multiple Lines of Text type hidden field on the form so the data is stored when the record is saved. Finally, when the web resource is loaded, you want to check if the field has data in it. If so, you can assume a signature was previously recorded and just show the data as an image.
Here’s the entire source code for a basic implementation:
1 <!DOCTYPE html> 2 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 3 <head> 4 <title>Signature</title> 5 <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-2.1.1.min.js"></script> 6 <script src="scripts/jSignature.min.js"></script><!-- download from http://willowsystems.github.io/jSignature/#/about/ --> 7 </head> 8 <body> 9 <img id="sigImage" alt="This is an image of the persons signature." style="display:none"/> 10 <div id="sigPanel" style="display:none"> 11 <div id="signature"></div> 12 <button id="clear">Clear</button> 13 </div> 14 <script type="text/javascript"> 15 $(function () { 16 var sigImage = $("#sigImage"); 17 var sigPanel = $("#sigPanel"); 18 var sig = $("#signature"); 19 20 var Xrm = window.parent.Xrm; 21 var sigBase64Attribute = Xrm.Page.getAttribute("msftpoc_esigbase64"); //replace this with your hidden "multiple lines of text" field with a max length of 1,048,576 22 var sigBase64Value = sigBase64Attribute.getValue(); 23 24 sig.bind("change", function (e) { 25 sigBase64Attribute.setValue(sig.jSignature("getData")); 26 }); 27 28 29 if (sigBase64Value != null) { 30 sigImage.css("display", "inline"); 31 sigImage.attr("src", sigBase64Value); 32 } else { 33 sigPanel.css("display", "inline"); 34 sig.jSignature(); 35 $("#clear").click(function() { 36 sig.jSignature("clear"); 37 }); 38 } 39 }); 40 </script> 41 </body> 42 </html> 43
All you have to do is add this web resource to your form (make sure you read instructions in the comments) and update the code to reference your field name. A few things to note:
Here are a couple screenshots for a quick visualization.
Before Save (signature capable canvas with clear button):
After Save (fixed image of signature):
With the release of CRM 2011 UR12, which introduced cross browser support, and the release of CRM 2013, there were two tools made available to you to check both your JavaScript code and your server side code for unsupported customizations:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Custom Code Validation Tool
There’s an excellent blog post about these tools with video walkthroughs here.
I’ve spoken with many customers/partners lately about these tools in the context of verifying where they stand for upgradability and creating a remediation plan for any unsupported customizations that might break after upgrading. One of the things I have also been emphasizing is how these tools can continued to be used in your development cycles to run a sanity check scan on new customizations. By introducing this approach into your testing process, you decrease the probability you are implementing unsupported customizations that can break during upgrades.
I happy to share that the article Andy Schultz (@andrewbschultz) and I coauthored for the MSDN Magazine – Special Government Issue, Oct 2013 has been published. You can read the entire issue here:
The article we wrote is titled Building Government Business Applications with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and is available here:
We set out to write an article that would not only appeal to MSDN Magazine’s core audience, .NET developers, but one that would also resonate with Technical Decision Makers (TDMs). While this article is in MSDN Magazine, it is intentionally not deeply technical. The article is an attempt to represent the narrative we typically share with our US Public Sector customers and partners about why they should consider building their business applications on Dynamics CRM.
UPDATE: The steps explained below don’t work with CRM 2013. However, Scott has a blog post which shows you how to get it working again:
http://develop1.net/public/post/Fiddler2-The-tool-that-gives-you-Superpowers-Part-2.aspx
One of my last posts was sharing how I use Visual Studio to debug CRM web resources:
This approach was one of those discoveries that makes us developer types get a little excited because it allows us to do something we do repeatedly in a much more efficient fashion. I just came across another one of those EUREKA moments thanks to Scott Durow (@scottdurow) and some his promising new http://www.sparklexrm.com project.
BTW, Scott’s the man behind Ribbon Workbench for Dynamics CRM. It’s the best Ribbon editor out there in my opinion. I digress…
I was reading through http://www.sparklexrm.com/s/Tutorials/SetUpNewProject.html and discovered a little gift from Scott at the end of the walkthrough. Steps 9-14 explain how to use www.fiddler2.com to let you debug changes to web resources without ever having to deploy them to Dynamics CRM. How? Steps 9-14 explain it.
Combine this with my post on F5 debugging from Visual Studio and you nearly have web resource developer productivity nirvana. I just tried combining the two approaches. It works beautifully! I was able to make changes to JavaScript, hit F5, debug right in Visual Studio, and repeat over and over again. I did this all without ever having to deploy the JavaScript file to the server. Because of it, I was able to iterate on my changes in a fraction of the time CRM developer typically spend. Try it yourself!
Scenario:
“Internet Explorer F12 JavaScript debugger is great, but I use Visual Studio. I want to be able to set breakpoints in my JavaScript web resources which I author in Visual Studio, then hit F5 on the keyboard or Debug->Start Debugging from the menu or the Play Button on my toolbar just like I do with all other types of development in Visual Studio. Visual Studio should then launch the right CRM url, attach its JavaScript debugger, and my breakpoints should be hit.”
This is the #1 piece of feedback I hear from the customers/partners/ISVs with whom I work. I’ve always told people it’s not possible. I just realized how wrong I am. Given that I’ve used every version Visual Studio since it was first released, I am a little embarrassed to say I just had this “A HA!” moment. Better late than never
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As I mentioned in this post, I have stopped using the Developer Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM for web resource authoring in favor of the CRM 2011 Web Resource Linker/Publisher. Note, I still use the developer toolkit for plugin / workflow activity authoring. As I state in the post about the web resource linker tool, since it allows you to keep all of your web resources in a standard web project in VS, you get all the benefits of web project capabilities including other addons that work with web projects. It’s this premise which brought me to my “A HA!” moment. Below is a video walkthrough of getting this scenario working:
You can install the jQuery Code Snippets from:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/577b9c03-71fb-417b-bcbb-94b6d3d326b8
DISCLAIMER: This is my opinion. I get nothing from the makers of this addon for expressing my opinion.
I’m a developer at heart. I love writing code. But I also abelieve in the “don’t write code unless you have to” philosophy. Well, I finally got around to playing around with North 52 Formula Manager and watch most of the YouTube Videos. All I can say is WOW. This addon is the answer to so many “Why can’t you do that with CRM without writing code?” questions. Frankly, I can’t think of any CRM/XRM app that WOULDN’T benefit from this addon. I also can’t rationalize writing code when I know I can use this addon to implement so many scenarios faster. You owe it to yourself to take a look at this addon. Review their site and watch the videos. I suspect you won’t be disappointed you did. Even with this addon, there will still be times when you will need to write JavaScript and .NET plugin code. However, the scenarios will be far fewer.
Gold Coast 