Links Customization

Let's start our journey into customization with the simple portal customization we discussed in the Use Case Corner of Chapter 6, “Homepage, Workplace and Navigation.” All files necessary to recreate this customization are found in the Chapter ExamplesChapter 14Linksfolder on the CD that accompanies this book.

TIP

As you work through the customization examples in this chapter, you will find it useful to have the Show Developer Errors Key in the web.config file set to On. This ensures that you see detailed errors as opposed to simple, generic error screens.


We discussed the concept of making Microsoft CRM the portal for all of our employees' information sources. We created a simple HTML page with links to relevant Web sites and we created a Links tab on the main application navigation pane to list our links for our users.

The Links.htm page consists of the following HTML:

<html>
<head>
<title>Useful Links</title>
</head>
<body>
<p align="center"><font face="Verdana"><small><b>Useful Links</b></small></font></p>
<p align="center"><font face="Verdana"><small><a href="http://www.cnn.com">CNN</a> - Read
 up on the latest news</small></font></p>
<p align="center"><small><font face="Verdana"><a href="http://www.c360.com">c360 Central<
/a> - c360 Corporate Web Site</font></small></p>
<p align="center"><small><font face="Verdana"><a href="http://www.amazon.com">Amazon</a> -
 Shop at Amazon.com</font></small></p>
</body>
</html>

After we create the Links.htm page, we will create a new folder titled Custom on the Web server to house our new page.

NOTE

It is recommended that you create a new folder on the Microsoft CRM server to place all customization files. Create this foler directly under the wwwroot directory and name the folder Custom. The Custom naming convention has quickly become a standard among Microsoft CRM developers. Within this folder, it is good practice to create a folder with the name of your organization so that your customizations will remain separate from those of other developers.


We must then insert the following line into the isv.config file in the <Home> element.

<NavBarItem Icon="/_imgs/ico_18_debug.gif" Title="Links" Url="/Custom/Links.htm" Id="Links"/>

Finally, let's not forget to make sure that theISV Integration key in the web.config file must be set to On for Microsoft CRM to display our new customization. Figure 14.1 shows our new Web page displayed within Microsoft CRM.

Figure 14.1. Our simple Links page customization.


When we now launch Microsoft CRM, we now see a new tab called Links. Clicking it shows our custom HTML page with the links we created. Remember, if you encounter an error setting up this customization, turn the DevErrors setting on in the web.config file so Microsoft CRM will provide you detail about what is going wrong.

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