Monday, March 20, 2006

DataGrids in a custom page

I've been working on a cool customization for one of our clients where the first screen you see is a "quick" summary of information from a given contact.

Some of the cool points about this customization are:

1. We found that by placing the custom tab first it loaded first instead of the General tab. Not something ground-breaking but one of those neat things to tuck away in your "gee-whiz" file for later.
2. This page pulls information from multiple related objects, Activities, Notes, Opportunities, etc, and displays given information on the page.
3. Related object information is displayed in datagrids. The coolest thing about this is that typically datagrids require a connector to SQL and you have to do a direct SQL pull to get your info. These grids, however, do not use a SQL connector and load CRM data through the CRM API. This means that I'm not breaking any Microsoft rules by doing a direct SQL pull and that you can keep your security views of the user viewing the contact.
4. The first time it loads on a client machine takes a few seconds. But after that the page loads just as fast as the rest of the CRM data.

Here are some screenshots of what it looks like:





It's all bogus data, but you get the idea. Just one of the cool customizations you can do with IFRAMES and custom ASPX pages. Happy coding!

David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

any further development of this? I was reading and it sounds interesting.

Anonymous said...

Hello. I am new in the CRM subject where I can obtain but data of this?

Anonymous said...

Fronk Rocks!

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