Activity Summary Customization

Our next customization is an Activity View for Sales Opportunities. It simplifies the task of reading through all Activities on a Sales Opportunity by putting the information in a single, scrollable view. All files necessary to recreate this customization are found in the Chapter ExamplesChapter 14Acetta Activity Summaryfolder on the CD that accompanies this book.

The Activity View customization is implemented as a custom tab on the Opportunity entity. We'll begin the installation of this customization by adding the following line to the Opportunity element of our isv.config file on our CRM Server:

<NavBar ValidForCreate="0" ValidForUpdate="1">
    <NavBarItem Icon="/_imgs/ico_18_debug.gif" Title="Activity Summary" Url="/Custom
/Acetta/ActivitySummary/activity/ActivityList1.aspx" PassParams="1" Id="ActivitySummary"/>
</NavBar>

We'll then copy the ActivitySummary.dll to the inetpubwwwrootin directory on the CRM server.

Finally, we'll copy the contents of the Chapter ExamplesChapter 14Acetta Activity SummaryCustomfolder on the CD accompanying this book to the inetpubwwwrootCustomfolder on the CRM server. If a folder titled Custom does not exist, create one now.

The next time we navigate to an Opportunity screen, we'll see our new custom Activity Summary tab. Clicking the tab will cause the ActivityList1.aspx file to be loaded, which in turn will call the ActivitySummary.dll, which assembles the Opportunity's Activity information in summary form and presents it to the user.

The bulk of the logic in this customization is implemented in the Page_Load method of the ActivityList1.aspx.vb Visual Basic .NET code behind file where general information about the opportunity is retrieved and displayed and where all the related activities are retrieved and displayed as well.

If you want to get more detail on this customization, all source code can be found on the book's CD at Chapter ExamplesChapter 14Acetta Activity SummaryActivitySummarySource.zip. The Microsoft Word file Chapter ExamplesChapter 14Acetta Activity SummaryActivityCustomization.doc goes into further detail about how to set up a project for the source code.

The Activity Summary customization was submitted by Tony Clayton of Acetta. Acetta is a Seattle-based CRM consulting firm with deep expertise in a variety of CRM systems. Acetta can be found on the Internet at http://www.acetta.net.