Osmosys Blog: CRM 2013 Features

CRM 2013 includes much awaited features which were being requested by the CRM users, which has made MS CRM more user friendly. Let us take dive into the new features included in this latest instance.

Editing on par with Desktop apps

Inline editing in a grid is a very common feature in desktop applications which made its way into web apps too. MS CRM introduced this feature in the sub-grids such as Opportunity Products, Quote Products.

For example, we can now add quote products to the quote with a single click and modify the values in there without actually opening up the quote product form.

We’re hoping to see the same feature available in the list views in the next update.

Image Attribute:

CRM 2013 now has a new attribute of type ‘Image’ (Schema name for this field is ‘entityimage’). We can store images for each record in CRM out of the box. This again has a limitation of single image attribute for each entity. So users no longert have to use hybrid solutions such as Silverlight/Flash and customizations to have this feature.

Allowed file types are .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .bmp, .png and the size of the image should be under 5MB and the size of the image should be 62 X 62 px

If we try to add another attribute of type Image, it gives out an error message. (Schema name of this attribute does not depend on the display name of the field, and this is fixed)

Adding a image using C# code:

Assuming you already have connection to MS CRM open , below code is how we can update the image attribute using the following C# code.

FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(_strFilePath);
byte[] bytes = newbyte[fs.Length];
fs.Read(bytes, 0, Convert.ToInt32(fs.Length));
Entity entContact = newEntity(“contact”);
entContact[“contactid”] = newGuid(“4421DEE8-D72C-E311-9754-D89D6765A26C”);
entContact[“entityimage”] = bytes;//Datatype of byte[] has to be used for Image attribute
service.Update(entContact);

Business Rules

These can be called as substitute to javascripts, which can handle client side validations. At this point though these cannot entirely replace the javascript, they give the user an easier way to validate as per the requirement instead of using javascript code. This feature adds more power to Plug-ins/Workflows.

You can find this under every entity under customizations section.