Jason Buss' Blog : Forms, Development

Launching Schedule Activity functionality in the SLX Web client

Jason Buss — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:31:00 GMT

On a recent project, I worked on emulating functionality similar to what is found in the LAN client where a user is presented a dialog asking them to choose between different activity types then launching into the Schedule Activity functionality. I found this was fairly easy to duplicate in the web client, and in this post, I'll quickly go through the steps for creating that type of functionality.

First of all, we need to create a quick from which will give users a choice of what type of activity to create. Since this form contains no bound controls, it doesn't matter where we save it. For the sake of consistency, I'd recommend saving it under SalesLogix Activity Support.

Under SalesLogix Activity Support in the Project Explorer, expand the Activity node, right-click the Forms folder and select "Add Form".

The important elements of this view are the radio group control and the button. The radio group will provide users the choice of what type of activity to create, and the button will handle launching the appropriate schedule activity dialog based on the option selected.

Once you have the blank form, add a radio group and control In the radio group control, I have added choices for Phone Calls, Meetings and ToDos.

On the button I added to the form, I added a C# Snippet Action item to the click event of the button and added the following code:

 LinkHandler Link = new LinkHandler(Page);
if (rgActivityType.SelectedIndex == 0)
{
    Link.SchedulePhoneCall();
}
else if (rgActivityType.SelectedIndex == 1)
{
    Link.ScheduleMeeting();
}
else if (rgActivityType.SelectedIndex == 2)
{
    Link.ScheduleToDo();
}
else
{
    throw new Sage.Platform.Application.ValidationException("You must select a activity type to continue");
}

Creating a LinkHandler object gives you access to the various Schedule Activity forms. An IF...Else statement calls the right schedule form based on what was selected. I also added a Validation Exception in case no activity type was selected before clicking the Next button.

Once you have saved the new quick form, it is ready to go. To use this form, you will need to add it to the available smartparts for whatever portal page you plan on calling the interface from. To add the form, expand the Portal Manager-Sage SalesLogix-Pages nodes, and double click on whichever page you want to use.

When the page has opened, select the SmartParts tab and add the new form. You will need to set the Target Workspace value to "DialogWorkspace".

Now that the QuickForm has been added, you will need to add code to launch the form. This could be from a button on a detail view, or wherever you can add a C# Snippit action.

I'm simply using the Dialog service to call the new QuickForm. The SetSpecs function I'm using allows you to set the dimensions of the form you launch. You may have to experiment with the settings to make things the appropriate size.

 {
    //create dialog for activity type to launch...
    if (DialogService != null)
    {
        DialogService.SetSpecs(110, 318, "ScheduleActivity", "Schedule Followup Activity");
        DialogService.ShowDialog();
    }
}

That's about all there is to it! I hope you find this example useful.

Thanks for reading!

Jason

SageCRM Tip - Editing screen definitions - Screen contents missing from screens

Jason Buss — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:39:00 GMT

On the last SageCRM project I worked on, I ran across a little issue with the CRM interface which was causing me a bit of a headache. I was working with a couple of screens I had defined for a custom entity. These screens were similar, so I was doing a lot of comparing one screen to another. Every once and a while, I would notice that the screen contents would disappear from the screen I was reviewing, and I would end up having to rebuild the screen.

After rebuilding this screen for the Nth time, I figured out what was going on: If you change your mind and do not perform any changes to the screen, you MUST click either "save" or "cancel" to navigate off of the Screen Definition page. Leaving the Screen Definition by simply navigating off the page causes the defined contents to be stripped from the screen.

Of course, even after I figured that out, I still had to rebuild the view a few more times before leaving the view properly became second nature! Anyway, I hope this brief post saves you some headaches.

Thanks for reading!

Displaying external data in SageCRM 200

Jason Buss — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:41:00 GMT

In this post, I will outline a relatively simply process for displaying data in SageCRM from an external data source. To keep this simple, we're not going to worry about any sort of security, and we'll save more advanced formatting for another post.

First of all, we need to create a reference to an external data source. For this example, I'm using the Standard "Northwind" database installed with SQL. To create a connection to an external datasource, click the "Administration" button, then "Advanced Customization" and finally "Tables and Databases".

Once in this area, click the "New Database Connection" button which will presented a Database Details view where you enter your connection information

I've entered the following info:

Database Driver: There are a number of options here, but since I'm connecting to a SQL database, I selected Microsoft SQLServer
Server Name: The name of the SQL server containing the external database.
Database Name: The name of the External Database.
Database Description
Username/Password: For the sake of this example, I'm simply using the standard sa username/password for this server.

Click "Save" after entering this information. The Northwind database will now display in the list of available Databases, however we still need to include a table. For this example, I'm going to use the "Orders" table in Northwind, but we need to perform a step on the database before we can display information from this table on the Team CRM tab.

To display on the Team CRM tab, the table needs to contain a field named chan_channelid. This field is used by the Team CRM tab to determine if the current user has access to see this data. For this example, we want all users to see this, so we want this field to contain a value of 5. We could just add a new column and insert that value across the entire table, however to avoid modifying the original source data, I'm going to create a view instead.

To create the view, I use the following syntax in SQL Query anaylizer:

create view vOrders as select 5 as chan_channelid, * from orders

I now have a view named "vOrders" which I can use in SageCRM

Back under Administration|Advanced Customizations|Tables and Databases, click the "New Table Connection" button to bring up the table details view:

On this view, we need to fill in the following information:

Table Name: This is the name of the view we created earlier
Table Caption: This is the caption by which the table (view) will be identified in SageCRM (Note: This value cannot contain spaces)
Database: This pull-down should contain the Northwind database that we created the connection to earlier.
ID Field Name: For this example, we're going to leave this value blank for now.

Click "Save" on this view. The data from the Northwind Orders table will now be available in SageCRM

Now that we've created connections to the Northwind table and Orders database (via a view), we need to create a list view containing Orders data. Go to Administration|Customizations. You should find the entry for "NorthwindOrders" listed in the Secondary entities pull-down. Once that is selected, click the "Lists" tab, and click the "New" Button:

For the New List Definition, we simply need to enter:

Name: This is the descriptive name of the List view
Table/View: the name of our view (vOrders)

Click Save, and then click the "Customize" button next to the newly created view to define the columns to display:

On this view, add whichever fields you want to display and click "Save" to finish configuring the new list view.

Now that we have our list view created, the only step remaining is to add the list view to the Team CRM area. To add a new tab to Team CRM, go to Administration|Advanced Customization and click on "System Menus". The tabs under Team CRM are defined in the "Channel" tab group, so click "Customize" next to that entry:

Here, we need to set three values:

Caption: This will display on the tab under Team CRM
Action: Run Block
Block Name: This is the Caption we defined for the list view.

Click Save, and we are done!

If we wanted to do additional formatting, say on the date fields or column captions, I would make those sort of changes in the view we created. Otherwise, this is a pretty simply method to display external data within SageCRM. In future postings on SageCRM, I'll try to get into adding data related to existing entites and possibly dig more into user security topics.

I hope you find this helpful, or at least interesting. Thanks for reading!

Using the Forms collection in the SalesLogix LAN client

Jason Buss — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:56:00 GMT

From time to time, you may find that you want to reference a control or script on a form other than the one you are currently on. This can be done easily using the Forms collection in SalesLogix.

The first thing we need to do is to loop through all open forms, checking for the desired form. For this example, we'll look for the Contact Detail form. (Note: we're looking for the value contained within the "Name" property of the form we are looking for.):

    Dim frm
    Dim x

    For x = 0 to Application.Forms.Count - 1
        If Application.Forms(x).Name = "frmContactDetail" Then
            Set frm = Application.Forms(x)
            Exit For
        End If
    Next

Once this code runs, we should have an object (frm) containing a reference to that form. If the form is not found, the code will return null, which we should look for before trying to manipulate anything

If Not frm Is Nothing Then
End If

Any references should be done within that IF statement. To access properties, you just need to include the form object (frm.{control}.{property}). For scripts, you'll need to access the forms Scripts collection (frm.scripts.{sub or function name})

That's all there is to it. All in all, pretty easy, right?

Keep in mind, this does require that the form you want to reference actually be open. If you want access to information to information on an uninitiated form, you'll need to access the appropriate tables directly.

Hope you find this post helpful. Thanks again for reading