Interesting feature in SharePoint webpart properties

by | Oct 1, 2007

I am currently developing a customized search webpart for a customer and I wanted to move all environment specific variables to the webpart public properties so that they can easily be changed and the same dll can be used in all environments (dev and production). One of the properties was Scope, which defined search scope to use. It was defined in the following way:

private string scope;

[Browsable(true), Category(“Settings”),

DefaultValue(“Documents”),

WebPartStorage(Storage.Shared),

FriendlyName(“Scope”),

Description(“Define Scope of search”),

XmlElement(ElementName = “Scope”)]

public string Scope

{

get

{

return scope;

}

 

set

{

scope = value;

}

}

 

Well, just to be on the safe side, I set the web part property to “Documents”, which is also what I had used as default. I was very confused the next time I opened the “Modify Shared Webpart” menu and found that the field was blank! First I thought there was some error in how the property was defined, but after a while I found that it actually blank the field if it is set to the value defined as default (in this case “Documents”).

So, if you run into this little “feature”, don’t be afraid, everything is just as it should be!

Gustaf

Creating custom views for MS CRM 3

by | Sep 26, 2007

Any modification made to the main or META-database is considered unsupported customization. Not very strange, since you never know what new fields or tables Microsoft might add to the database.

Sometimes, however, especially when working with reports, it can be useful to create your own views that aggregate data to your needs. Adding a view to the CRM database might be the easiest and you will probably be ok as long as you are a bit careful when naming the view. However, you don’t have to do it this way. You can also create a new database on the same server and create your view in this database. To be able to access the views (and if you still want to play unsupported, tables), just add the database name in front of the viewname. For instance:

SELECT * FROM MyCompany_MSCRM.dbo.SystemUser;

The “dbo” part doesn’t have to be there but is added by the view creator GUI, so I left it there to avoid any misunderstandings.

Unfortunately, the “Add Table” function in the GUI doesn’t support selecting views from other tables even though it is supported in the database.

As far as I know, it is also possible to connect to a view in a database on another server. I don’t know how this is done and don’t really see the relevance from a MS CRM 3 perspective, but if I find out how, I will let you know.

Gustaf

Office 2007 + CRM = true

by | Sep 16, 2007

Michael Höhne is one of the most generous and knowledgable people in the Microsoft CRM 3 community. His webpage http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/ hosts lots of very interesting articles, both for advanced Microsoft CRM developers and more novice Microsoft CRM application professionals. For instance, he has a very interesting posting showing an example of how to use the new file format OpenXML that comes with Office 2007 in conjuction with Microsoft CRM 3 to make very powerful software with almost no effort (ok, a little effort 🙂

Have a look: http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=OpenXml

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Selecting multiple records from a grid in MS CRM 3

by | Sep 13, 2007

Using isv.config customizations you can add buttons to the menybar above a grid (next to “More Actions”). A special technique has to be used to fetch the selected records and Ronald Lemmen wrote some about it this summer, here: http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2007/06/fetching-selected-records-in-grid.html . I had reason to try it and ran into problems when the url of the file containing the javascript was on a different server (different tcp-port has the same characteristics as a different server from an IE viewpoint). The window.dialogArguments was null. I tried to modify the settings in IE but found no way of getting around the problem except for setting up a virtual directory bellow the CRM-site containing the html-file.

So, if you run into similar problems, try moving the html-file to a directory on the same server (from an IE standpoint).

Gustaf