Dynamics 365 Server version 9.0 available for download

A few days behind schedule, but the highly anticipated Dynamics 365 version 9.0 for On-Premise deployments is not available for download. Preview releases have been available for a while now via the Microsoft experience web site, but on 11/2 Microsoft made this release public.

SharePoint Documents are back in Dynamics Portals October 2018 Release

Ever since Microsoft purchased AdxStudios and replaced the product with Dynamics Portals, one of the biggest pains was the removal of SharePoint documents. The interim solution of course was available using Azure blobs with the Dynamics Labs solution which provided document uploads, but using the Out of the Box SharePoint Documents was a miss by a lot of Portal Developers.

Changing the details page link url for Entity Lists

When displaying entity lists on a web page, there is usually a default column in a view which is displayed as a hyperlink. The link to the page is displayed based on the Web Page for Details View and the ID Query String Parameter Name attributes on the Entity List form (as shown in the image below). The problem is, what happens if my page that is displaying the Entity List already has query string parameters, and you want to keep those parameters on the next page that you are going to display.

Adding masking to form controls in Dynamics Portals

It is a pretty known practice today, that when creating a web application that requests data from customers, certain fields are masked so that the system can prevent the entry of incorrect data. This has been done in desktop applications for a long time and is now also very common in web based applications.

Using Placeholders in Portal Entity Form Text Controls

Recently I was working on a project, where the client needed all fields to have placeholders for accessibility reasons. When looking at the attribute metadata of the Entity Form, we are allowed to enter some text above or below the textbox control (or above the label), but the option is not available to prepopulate the control with some text when there is no data in it. After seeing a few community questions on how to implement this, I thought to share the solution.

Changing Portal Lookup Control to Hyperlink Style Control

Recently we had a requirement to change the Lookup Control in the Portal to look like a hyperlink, so that when the user clicked on the Hyperlink it would pop up the Lookup Dialog.
The Lookup control was displayed as part of an entity form, so the only way to really do this was with jquery.

Multiple Fetch Xml Statements with Or Filter in Portal Web Template

In a recent project, we had a requirement to display cases to the portal that are associated with either Contacts or Accounts. Our case entity had a related entity called Case Contacts, and our account entity had a related entity called Account Contacts. The account entity had a list of all the cases associated with the account.

Dynamics 365 and SharePoint Online Integration – CRM Implementation

For the final part of the series, I am going to demonstrate and explain the portions that resides inside Dynamics CRM (or can possibly be built inside other applications). The solution includes an HTML web resource that contains a subgrid (using JQWidgets, but can be replaced with any third party jquery grid or bootstrap table). The subgrid contains a list of documents that are contained in SharePoint, and provides the functionality to upload or download additional documents.

Portals: Pass multiple parameters between Entity Forms

Recently we had the need to create multiple Entity forms in our portal, and be able to pass multiple parameters between the different pages of the portal. As it seems, you are able to pass a single parameter (such as the id of the created record) to the next form, but passing multiple does not seem to be the case. For this particular scenario, using Web Forms was not an option. 

JavaScript Web Files in CRM Portals

As in any project, either CRM or Web application, the requirement to have JavaScript libraries that can be accessed across multiple files is common. In Dynamics 365 Portals, the use of Web Files is how we have the ability of create files that will be shared across the entire portal, or possibly only sections of the Portal. These common files are stored in the Web Files entity. This issue is that when we try to add a JavaScript web file, we get an error that the attachment is blocked. Web Files use the Notes entity to store the actual files that we add to the Web File entity.