I was having a chat with a colleague recently about the new Interactive Service Hub (ISH) in CRM, in particular the new entity forms that are used as part of this. One of the questions that came up was “From a form scripting point of view, do ISH forms let you utilise all of the same references, properties and methods available as part of a Main form?”. As is generally the case in these situations, we can turn to our good friends TechNet and MSDN for answers. Specifically, we are able to find out the following on MSDN:
All the form scripting events and methods supported by the CRM mobile clients (phone and tablet) are supported in the interactive service hub.
If your organisation is fortunate enough to be using CRM 2016 Update 1 or CRM 2016 Service Pack 1, then you can also utilise the following methods/events as well:
- All the events and methods for sub-grids, except the ViewSelector methods. More information: Grid objects and methods (client-side reference)
- getId method in the Xrm.Page.data.entity namespace
- close, getCurrentControl, and Form Notification methods in the Xrm.Page.ui namespace
- DisplayState, Label, and setFocus methods for a tab (group of sections in a page)
- All the navigation item methods: More information: Xrm.Page.ui.navigation item (client-side reference)
- openEntityForm and openQuickCreate in the Xrm.Utility namespace
- setFocus and setShowTime methods for controls
- addCustomFilter and addCustomView for lookup controls
- getInitialUrl and getObject for only IFRAME controls; getSrc and setSrc for both web resource and IFRAME controls
- All the events and methods for the knowledge base search control. More information: Knowledge base search control (client-side reference)
Source: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt671135.aspx#Anchor_1
So what does this mean in practical terms and how should this factor into your decision to utilise Interactive Forms over standard CRM forms? Here are a few things to consider, as well as my own thoughts on the best way to proceed:
If you are on CRM 2016, then get yourself Update 1/Service Pack 1 ASAP
There are a number of important new methods that can be used for interactive forms as part of this update. For example, you get much better options when it comes to working with IFRAME controls, interacting with the currently loaded record you are working with (via getID), loading a new record form (via openEntityForm or openQuickCreate) and setting focus to a particular field on a form (via setFocus). This goes above and beyond what is currently supported via the CRM tablet apps, and it is good to see that this CRM update has added these in. Having access to these methods may help to decide whether you can safely migrate or start using ISH forms within your organisation. And, as we have seen previously, the update process to SP1 for CRM 2016 is relatively straightforward, so why wouldn’t you look at upgrading?
Be sure you familiarise yourself with Interactive Form debugging
Anyone who works with CRM form scripting will be familiar with the trials and tribulations of browser debugging your scripts via Developer Tools on your browser of choice: open up your script library, set your breakpoints and then perform the actions needed to trigger your script. Try this with the new Interactive Forms, and you will notice that your custom library is not loaded onto the form. What the fudge?!?
Before panicking too much, the good news is that scripts can still be debugged, but you just have to go down a slightly different route. The CRM Team have written an excellent blog post that covers not just debugging for interactive forms, but for all forms as well. The first two options suggested seem to be the most straight-forward way of debugging interactive forms, but you can’t help but laugh at the fact that one of the suggested options is to use functionality within Google Chrome! 🙂 Joking aside, using Dynamic JScript in the manner outlined looks to be an effective way of setting breakpoints in a familiar manner. I may have to look at trying this at some point in the future.
You cannot programmatically switch to a different entity form in the Interactive Service Hub
It is sometimes useful to change the currently loaded form that a user is presented with depending on certain conditions. For example, if a user enters certain data within a Lead form to indicate the record should be treated as high priority, you may want a new form to be opened that contains additional fields, subgrids etc. that need to be completed in order to progress the record accordingly. Within the Xrm.Page.Ui reference, we have two methods that help us achieve this objective: formSelector.getCurrentItem, which returns the GUID for the currently loaded form, and formSelector.items, which returns a list of GUID’s for all forms that the current user has access to. The bad news is that, because these two methods are not supported in the mobile app, you will also be unable to use them within the ISH. This is likely due to the fact that, similar to Mobile Forms, only one form is presented to user when using the ISH, which is dictated by the form order and the users security permissions.
ISH forms do not contain a Ribbon
This may be one of the major reasons that prevent against an en masse adoption of ISH forms in the near future. One of the benefits of using the default CRM forms is the ability to modify the the CRM ribbon in order to add, remove or modify button behaviours across the application. This is great if you decide that you don’t want your users to have access to the Delete button, need to modify the order of the buttons to match the ones that are used the most or you need to setup a custom button that performs a web server call to an external system. Again, similar to the mobile application, there is no ribbon anywhere on the ISH, which means you may be missing out on key functionality going down this route.
ISH can only currently be used with a limited list of entities
If you are hoping to get your CRM setup to use ISH for your Sales related entities, then don’t get too carried away at this stage. You are currently limited to using ISH with a specific list of CRM entities. The full list, courtesy of our good friends again, is as follows:
- Account
- Contact
- Case
- All Activity Entities (System/Custom)
- Social Profile
- Queue Item
- Knowledge Article
- Custom Entities
Expect this to change in future, as one of the things that I have previously highlighted as part of Update 1/Service Pack 1 was the ability to add Feedback onto any entity within CRM, including custom ones. It would make sense that the Sales side of CRM gets some love and attention to include Leads, Opportunities etc. as part of ISH (so we may not even call it this if that happens!).
Conclusions or Wot I Think
It is clear that, whilst some of the headline benefits of using ISH are clear - visual experience, ability to drill down to individual records and efficient record filtering - , there are some very crucial and important technical limitations with the feature that need to be factored in before you decide to just completely migrate across to ISH. I would say that if your organisation has not been extensively customised to utilise form level scripting and other types of bespoke development work, then you can perhaps get away with making the jump. By contrary, you should be holding off and evaluating your existing customisations first to see if a) they are supported/unsupported by ISH or b) if there is some way to drop certain form scripting, ribbon customisations etc. in favour of using something default within CRM (for example, a Business Rule instead of a Jscript function). It could be that you can ditch a whole load of code that is not required as part of this exercise and instead utilise base functionality within CRM, something which is always preferable.
One thing I have been wondering about is the eventual aim with the ISH: is it intended that this will eventually replace the existing CRM user experience or will it continue to just be an alternative way of using CRM? It will be interesting to see how the feature is developed over the next couple of releases of CRM; one of the key indicators of this replacing the “old style” CRM forms is if we start to see all form scripting options made available in ISH and the introduction of the Ribbon.
In the meantime, make sure you do check out ISH at some stage, as the potential of setting up a visually attractive reporting and day-to-day application tool is huge. Just don’t let your Sales team see it yet, as you will end up disappointing them!