Building Custom Screens On Top of Dynamics CRM

Gayan Perera, 14 August 2010

When building xRM applications on top of Dynamics CRM, the existing create, edit forms are sometimes just too many clicks away or would be a step back from the existing software you’re trying to replace.

The solution is to build a streamlined screen to suit the business requirements.

Here’s a real world example

The above screenshot shows an optimized user interface which combines existing entities such as Account, Contact and Notes as well custom entities to hold Loan Information, Transactions, Payment Schedules and Products that are associated with the loan.

So, how do you achieve the same thing in your project?

The Look
To get the interface looking similar to Dynamics CRM we use the IE Developer Toolbar add-on. We then copy the css and images as required. Once you do a few custom screens you’ll have enough data to create master pages and themes and be able to re-use them over and over again.

Ajax
Dynamics CRM is full of ajax so we need to try to ajax as much as possible. We use Telerik asp.net ajax controls, jQuery and jQuery autocomplete.

Displaying & Updating Data
If you’ve just started with Dynamics CRM and the SDK you’re probably wondering what you’ve got yourself into. FetchXml, QueryExpressions and the Request/Response model can be a bit scary at times. We use a LINQ library by XrmLinq to make this easier.