My colleague Daniel Westerblom at WM-Data asked my a question concerning the fake lookups that I have referenced bellow and that I know are commonly used by many partners. The question was if these customizations are supported.
When I was at convergence I asked this explicit question to, I think it was, Clint Warriner (CRM Escalation Engineer at Microsoft Support) and he gave me confirmation on what I had suspected, that these customizations are not supported. They fall under the last point concerning unsupported customizations described in the SDK:
“The use of custom HttpModules to inject HTML/DHTML into the Microsoft CRM Forms.”
Since the HTML DOM is modified, this is not supported.
The reason for this is most probably that Microsoft might choose to change this in future releases of CRM (for instance CRM 4.0) and might also have internal scripting references to objects they expect to be there according to the standard HTML DOM.
I don’t know if these fake lookups will upgrade from CRM 3.0 to 4.0 without problems. If you have any experience of it, please let me know.
If you have any comments on this subject, please feel free to comment bellow. I always publish comments that concern the subject and are not directly offensive. (I have activeted moderation on comments just to avoid comment spamming).
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Consultant
WM-Data/Logica CMG
www.logicacmg.com
On connect, there is a topic, concerning this issue. There will be no support for the filtered lookup. (the one that can be found on ronnaldlemmen’s blog)
Hey Gustaf,
Where did you mention the fake lookup? I can’t seem to find it anywhere..
Regards Morten G
Re: Anonymous,
yes, that is correct. That solution has never been within the scope of supported customizations since you need (as far as I know) to modify existning aspx-pages, which is, of course, unsupported.
Morten G:
You will find it at the following link:
http://gustafwesterlund.blogspot.com/2007/09/fake-lookups.html
I have actually just linked to the original post at another blog.
To create a fake lookup, I added an iframe that called a custom .net page that displays what looks like a lookup. Upon clicking on the lookup icon it opens a window (that also has the look and feel of a normal lookup window). I’ve also passed information to have it filter contacts based on the current account on an opportunity.
Yockey:
Yes, that is always a technique you can use and it is also supported. If you havn’t developed some very generic version of the .net-page, you will, however, have to create one page for each lookup which is a bit tediuous. I would recommend this solution if a fake lookup was required.
Thank you for your input!