Change Left Nav Links to Point to Custom Associated Entities

In an earlier post, I talked about the shortcomings of the out-of-the-box Address entity. In a recent project, we replaced the system Address entity with a custom Address entity. When we added a 1:N relationship for Contacts:New_Addresses, the link to the new address entity showed up on the left hand nav of the Contact form, as expected. However, it was added at the bottom of the left hand nav links under the "Workflow" link.

We wanted to keep the Addresses link where it was, but load the associated view of our custom entity instead. So when a user clicks on the "More Addresses" link, they will see the list of custom address records, rather than the out-of-the-box addresses. Here's the OnLoad code we used:

// load the custom address entity instead of the system addresses
// in the associated view
// I used the IE Developer Toolbar to find the id of the custom entity's loadArea

if (document.getElementById('navAddresses') != null) { document.getElementById('navAddresses').onclick = function() { loadArea('new_contact_new_address') };
}

// Hide the link to the custom address entity that was added under the workflow link
// when we created the 1:N relationship

if (document.getElementById('nav_new_contact_new_address') != null) { document.getElementById('nav_new_contact_new_address').style.display = 'none';
}