hari.mallampati

Monday 23 September 2013

Creating email using Rest Javascript call In MSCRM 2011

How to create an email activity using REST Endpoints in CRM2011

How tough it can be to create an activity using code? It sounds very easy but there are few issues, if you are using REST Endpoints.

REST Endpoints do not support all the CRM data types. One of those data type is PartyList. PartyList is very important to create most of the activity like emails, appointments, phone calls etc.

To set the value of the PartyList field you need an array of PartyLists as you can have more than value for those fields. For e.g you can have more than one recipient for an email or you can have more than resource for an appointment.

As I mentioned earlier, REST Endpoints do not support PartyList, So its is impossible to assign value to these fields. If you look at DataSet returned by the Rest Endpoints, It looks like they are treating PartyList fields like string fields.

These values does not even return the guid or name of the PartyList entity. if you look at sender field in the screen shot above, it does not have guid or the name of the system user who sent this email.
I tried the same using following code:

email.Sender="crm2011@emailops.com.au";
var partlistcollection = new Array(); //tried to create an array of PartyLists

partlistcollection[0] = {Id: "8384E684-7686-E011-8AF0-00155D32042E",LogicalName: "contact",Name: "Amreek Singh"};
email.ToRecipients=JSON.stringify(partlistcollection);

But it did not work, if you pass a string value to the PartyList fields, You won’t get any error message but you won’t see any value in those fields on a created entity.

Now here is the solution. You need to create an activity (in this case it’s an email) first and then create a PartyList entity and link it back to the created activity.

function CreateEmail() {
alert("CreateEmail Begin");

var email = new Object();
email.Subject = "Sample Email Using REST";
SDK.JScriptRESTDataOperations.Create(email, "Email", EmailCallBack, function (error) { alert(error.message); });
}

// Email Call Back function
function EmailCallBack(result)
{
var activityParty=new Object();
// Set the "party" of the ActivityParty // EntityReference of an entity this activityparty relatated to. 
activityParty.PartyId = {
  Id: "8384E684-7686-E011-8AF0-00155D32042E",//replace this with the contactid from your system.
  LogicalName: "contact"
};
// Set the "activity" of the ActivityParty
// EntityReference.
activityParty.ActivityId = {
  Id: result.ActivityId, 
  LogicalName: "email"
};
// Set the participation type (what role the party has on the activity).
activityParty.ParticipationTypeMask = { Value: 2 }; // 2 mean ToRecipients
SDK.JScriptRESTDataOperations.Create(activityParty, "ActivityParty",ActivityPartyCallBack , function (error) { alert(error.message); });
}

function ActivityPartyCallBack(reuslt)
{
alert("Process Completed");
}

activityParty.ParticipationTypeMask = { Value: 2 }; is very important as it will specify if this PartList is sender/recipient/resource etc of the activity.

Here is the link to complete list of activityParty.ParticipationTypeMask click here.
For this sample, I have used the generic REST CRUD data operations library created by Jim Daly.
Add references to following Java Script web resources to try the solution.

SDK.JScriptRESTDataOperations
JSON2

Here is the link to unmanaged solution RESTEmailSolution_1_0

I hope this helps.

Adding a custom button on report viewer window for SSRS reports

Add a clear button to SQL Server Reporting Services

If you ever had the need to add a clear / reset button to your standard SQL Server Reporting Services report viewer, here’s a way to do it. Normally when reports are displayed, they are piped through the ReportViewer.aspx page that comes with SSRS. This page hosts the Reporting Server host component, and adds text boxes, radio buttton etc. based on the number of parameters you have in your report. So here’s a way to add a clear button to SQL Server Reporting Services.
Something like this:

You can’t simply replace this file with your own custom page, because SSRS has HTTP handlers installed that prevents any other file to be rendered except the ReportViewer.aspx page.
So how to add a clear button to clear the text boxes? One way to do it is to modify the OOB ReportViewer.aspx page by injecting some javascript that does this for us. Initially I wanted to use jQuery, but again, the HTTP handler prohibits us from accessing the external .js file. Back to plain old Javascript it is.
Essentially, we just need to find the container that holds the View Report button, and add our custom button.
In the body tag, add a page onload event handler:

<body style="margin: 0px; overflow: auto" onload="addClearButton();">

and then add some javascript code:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementsByClassName = function(cl) {
    var retnode = [];
    var myclass = new RegExp('\\b'+cl+'\\b');
    var elem = this.getElementsByTagName('*');
    for (var i = 0; i < elem.length; i++) {
        var classes = elem[i].className;
        if (myclass.test(classes)) retnode.push(elem[i]);
    }
    return retnode;
};

function addClearButton(){
    var inputs = document.getElementsByClassName('SubmitButtonCell');

    // can't find the cell, return
    if (inputs.length<1)
        return;

    // create a button
    var clearButton = document.createElement("input");
    clearButton.type = "button";
    clearButton.value = "Clear";
    clearButton.name = "btnClear";
    clearButton.style.width = "100%";

    // add clear text boxes functionality to the onclick event
    clearButton.onclick = function (){
        var textBoxes = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
        for (var i=0;i<textBoxes.length;i++){
        if (textBoxes[i].getAttribute("type")=="text"){
          textBoxes[i].value ="";
          }
        }
    };

    // find the relevant cells
    var tdSubmitButtonCell = inputs[0];

    // find the child table
    var table = tdSubmitButtonCell.childNodes[0];
    var lastRow = table.rows.length;
    var row = table.insertRow(lastRow);
    var cellLeft = row.insertCell(0);

    // add the clear button
    cellLeft.appendChild(clearButton);
  }

</script>

The final result will look something like this:

The code can be found on GitHub.com at: Custom SQL Server Reporting Services ReportViewer.aspx page

posted in Blog by Magnus Johansson

Run a report from a ribbon button in mscrm 2011

To run a report from a ribbon button you need to create a js file with a function you'll be calling from your button.
You need 4 things:

rdlName - rdl file name.
reportGuid GUID of the report.
entityGuid = Entity GUID wich you run report for.
entityType = Entity Object Type Code.

Here is the example.

function printOutOnClick() {
    // This function generates a Print out
    var rdlName = "SomeReport.rdl";
    var reportGuid = "9A984A27-34E5-E011-B68F-005056AC478A";
    var entityGuid = Xrm.Page.data.entity.getId();//Here I am getting Entity GUID it from it's form
    var entityType = "4214";
    var link = serverUrl + "/" + organizationName + "/crmreports/viewer/viewer.aspx?action=run&context=records&helpID=" + rdlName  + "&id={" + reportGuid + "}&records=" + entityGuid + "&recordstype=" + entityType;
    openStdDlg(link, null, 800, 600, true, false, null);
}

openStdDlg() is the wrapper around window.open() MS Dynamics CRM uses it itself, so do I.
To add it to a ribbon button you need to do like in this post How to start a Dialog from Application Ribbon (CRM 2011) except you need to call report instead a dialog.