CRM 2013 Mobile App Customising What Entities are Enabled

Jared Johnson, 29 October 2013

The CRM 2013 Mobile app by default displays the following entities:

Read/Write:
  •  Account
  •  Contact
  •  Lead
  •  Opportunity
  •  Opportunity Product
  •  Notes
  •  Competitor
  •  Connection
  •  Appointment
  •  Task
  •  Phone call

Read Only:
  •  Cases
  •  Email
  •  Product
  •  User
  •  Teams
  •  Currency

This is governed by the CRM for tablets and Read-only in CRM for tablets options in the entity definition. However for most out of the box entities these options are disabled, not allowing entities to be disabled from showing in the Mobile App, in addition all out of the box entities not shown in the App by default have these options disabled. However there are a few out of the box entities which allow them to be disabled, such as Accounts.

From Left to Right: A custom entity with tablet display options able to be enabled/disabled, an out of the box entity set to be enabled that cannot be changed, and another out of the box entity that is set disabled and cannot be changed.

Custom entities however can be freely enabled or disabled, allowing the display of custom entities in the Mobile App.

Enabling a custom entity will cause it to appear in the navigation of the app, with a default green gear icon similar to the default custom icon in CRM 2013, custom icons are not pulled down into the App.

Custom Entity Menu Item

Subgrid and chart of a custom entity added to App dashboard

Custom Entity now available for searching

Enabling a custom entity also allows charts or sub grids of that entity to be displayed in the Sales dashboard shown in the App, and allow that entity to be added to the multi entity search used by the App, as well as allowing the entity to be edited in the app.

Message that appears in the App when customisations have been published.

Customizing the system after an App is connected to that system will display a message prompting to download the new customisations, however especially with changing which entities will be displayed in the app this may not work correctly. For instance if Cases are set to not be shown in the App, the next time the App is started and customisations downloaded will result in the Cases not being displayed in the App, but if Cases are then enabled they will not reappear, although subgrids and charts containing Cases may reappear after pressing the back button from the Search screen. Other times Cases will reappear, but will display an error message when trying to open a Case. Thus to ensure the customisations have been applied correctly it is necessary to uninstall and reinstall the App.