by gustaf | Sep 29, 2022
With Release Wave 2 2022, the old advanced find will be removed and the new advanced find experience will be its replacement. However, there are many old goats, like me out there that still want to use the old advanced find. I think one of the main advantages of the old advanced find is that it is not bound to the tables/entities of the specific app which makes it easy to have a look at things that are a bit more hidden from normal view. The new experience will require you to, in essence, create an admin app with all the required tables. Another option is of course to use Jonas Rapp’s Fetch XML Builder to find what ever you need, but that has another level of geek to it that might not fit all superusers out there. (Although I think they really would like it if they learnt how).
So, with the following URL you can still access the old advanced find and you can hence just bookmark it and have it easily available. How long this will be the case, I cannot say. But probably a year or so. And do send your feedback to Microsoft of the new experience so that they can make it as good as it should be.
https://<instance>.<region>.dynamics.com/main.aspx?pagetype=AdvancedFind
For example, with instance contoso in region 1 (USA):
https://contoso.crm1.dynamics.com/main.aspx?pagetype=AdvancedFind
Note that you do not actually have to include the app as a query parameter.
by Gustaf Westerlund | Nov 14, 2008
As many of you know, in CRM 3 there is a special view of an entity form called quickcreate. This is used when you press “New” in a lookup window. For instance, on an account you can press: select primary contact, when the search dialog shows you can instead of selecting an existing contact press the new button and a “slimline” version of the contact form show with just the must-have and should-have fields available.
In CRM 4 this feature is not used any more and the complete form will always be shown in this case, however, the functionality hasn’t been removed. I tried to find some kind of reference to it in the SDK but couldn’t so I had a look in the original CRM code in CRM 3 and found how to do it.
To open a form as quick create, find the object type code (1 = account etc) and go to the URL:
http://[server:port]/[organisation]/_forms/QuickCreateReturn/quickcreate.aspx?crmFormSubmitObjectType=[objecttypecode].
For example, for account on the local machine when CRM is installed on port 5555 and the company is named “company”:
http://localhost:5555/company/_forms/QuickCreateReturn/quickcreate.aspx?crmFormSubmitObjectType=1
Since I couldn’t find any official reference to this in the SDK it is very possibly unsupported to do this but it works for now. Any hotfixes or similar might, but are not very likely to change this functionality, new versions of CRM like v.next are more likely to change/remove this functionality.
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect
Logica
www.logica.com
by Gustaf Westerlund | Nov 5, 2008
I was searching the net the other day to try to find a way to programmatically get the reporting server url from CRM. I thought that there must be some way to find it using the standard CRM webservice and I really looked throught the SDK and all the blogs I could find to see if anyone knew.
Finally I gave up and tried to find some other way to get it and I remembered that it is set in the registry so I wrote some code to get it from there and here it is in all it’s simple glory:
RegistryKey regkey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(@”SOFTWAREMicrosoftMSCRM”);
string reportserver = regkey.GetValue(“SQLRSServerURL”).ToString();
And it worked but only just since it uses the server name and my VPN connection to the customers environment didn’t bother with sending it to me why I have to manually add it to the hosts file.
The host file can be found at the path: C:WINDOWSsystem32driversetchosts
and I added the row:
192.168.0.100 CRMTESTSRV
Now my button which point to my aspx that redirects to a the report in pdf-format works just fine and is independant of the CRM server it is installed on.
The solution isn’t supported as far as I know since you never know if they might change the registry value in the future (not very likely in an update but might happen in an upgrade). If anyone has any supported way of getting this URL, please comment this post.
This could also be done using javascripts but I find it easier to manage server side code and it doesn’t add that much overhead considering the report has to be generated independantly of if I use aspx or javascript to open the report.
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect
Logica
www.logica.com
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