How to pre-filter the form assistant

Gayan Perera, 28 May 2010

Time for another trick...

While trying to reduce as many clicks as possible one customer insisted that they want the form assistant pre-filtered, most of you are aware that this is not supported. Google Bing said it's unsupported and I couldn't see any useful info so opened up the IE Dev Toolbar and found that there are 2 elements; a textbox for searching via form assistant and the search icon (findValue and btnGo), now all that's needed is to put our pre-filtering text into it and force click that button!

On the form onLoad event

function autoFilter() {
    try {
        // check to see if we need to pre-filter
        if (crmForm.all.somefield.DataValue != null) {
            var search = document.getElementById("findValue");
            // inject our pre-filter value into the form assistant
            search.value = crmForm.all.somefield.DataValue;
            // force it to do the search
            document.getElementById("btnGo").click();
            // clear the value since we're on a timeout if the user switches rapidly it will give invalid results
            search.value = "";
        }
    } catch (e) { } // ignore errors
}

// lookup you want to filter, note the _d
var lookup = document.getElementById("lookup_d");
// timeout is needed because crm generates the form assistant dynamically
// need a better solution than timeout...any suggestions?
lookup.attachEvent('onclick', function(event) { setTimeout(autoFilter, 1500) });

Here's an example of a parent/child lookup being pre-filtered via the form assistant

Enjoy!

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