Quick Start Dialogs on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

One of the great new enhancements in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is the addition of Dialogs.

Dialogs are interactive forms which can be launched from any record and used to gather information, Script out a business process, or just make record collection easier.

For example your support team might want an easier process for gathering case information:

The only thing that I would have liked to see was a way of starting the dialogs automatically, perhaps based on choices, or via Workflow.

The way Dialogs are started is by clicking the ‘Start Dialog’ button on the top of the form:

Well you can!

I’ll give you a very basic example:

On a case form we want to start a Dialog based on a field choice – In the example I have created a field that simply asks if you want to start the dialog:

Off the back of this there is an on-change action calling a web resource.

The web resource in this case uses this JavaScript:

// Load Dialog

function opendialog()

{

window.open("http://OURSERVER:5555/CRM/cs/dialog/rundialog.aspx?DialogId=%7b78775EA3-ECB2-473E-AD85-1832807BDCF6%7d&EntityName=incident&ObjectId=%7bE0CDDDAB-22BF-DF11-A979-0017084E4F37%7d");

}

Every Dialog (Like most things in CRM) has a GUID and a URL, so all the on-change event is doing is calling up the Dialog in a new window.

Just FYI you can get the Dialog URL by starting it and hitting ctrl>n which opens it in a new window complete with full URL.

Publish it all and voila a choice on your case form starts a Dialog.

There are all sorts of possibilities using this sort of method, and I’m still playing with it, but the above example is a start.