Showing Associated Activities In An IFrame

Here's a cool little piece of script that can help make you a star for your customers/end-users. I frequently get the request to show history items right on the main tab of a CRM contact or an account form. A lot of salespeople are accustomed to other contact management solutions that don't require so much clicking around as Microsoft CRM.

So here's how you do it:
First, let's add an IFrame to your contact form. Let's call it HistoryFrame. Set the URL to "about:blank" (no http or anything), check the "Pass record object-type code and unique identifier as parameters" option, deselect the "Restrict cross-frame scripting." I've formatted my IFrame to automatically expand and scroll as necessary.


(Click image to enlarge)

We're going to add some script to the OnLoad event to dynamically change the URL of the IFrame to point to the activities history. In addition, we're going to remove the History link from the left navigation, just to unclutter the view for our end-users and so they're not confused ;-)

Next, on the contact form customization screen, click Form Properties and choose the OnLoad event and click Edit.

Add this script and enable it:

var navActivityHistory;
navActivityHistory =
document.all.navActivityHistory;

if (navActivityHistory != null)
{
navActivityHistory.style.display = "none";
document.all.IFRAME_HistoryFrame.src="/sfa/conts/areas.aspx?oId=" +
crmForm.ObjectId +
"&oType=2&security=852023&tabSet=areaActivityHistory";
}
else
{
alert("navHistory Not Found");
}

The key part of this script is the tabSet=areaActivityHistory part. If you want to show the open Activities in the IFrame, the tabSet will be areaActivities and you will want to change the navActivityHistory to navActivities in the rest of the code.

Here's the finished product:


(Click image to enlarge)

Now, if you can figure out what the other tabSets are called in a MS CRM record, you can go IFrame crazy!

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