Lists in IFrames

With thanks to the ICU-MSCRM blog who started me off in this direction.

A customer is looking to use the CRM to run their recruitment and training company. They are not particularly IT-literate and my spec as been a series of required fields and free reign in developing ways of tracking the recruitment and training progress of candidates.

Each training candidate has a series of targets that consist of a target date, an actual date and some details. Depending on the course they could have between 1 and 16 different targets to reach. This became a custom entity with a relationship to the Contact account (renamed Person).

Each Account (renamed Company) has can either have a collection of trainees associated with it or a number of positions needing filled. Or both. Trainee is another custom entity with some basic details of the person and who their supervisor is and the job vacancy is just a custom entity with a couple of details about the job (temp/perm, hourly rate that kind of thing) related back to the person to record who was recruited for the job.

To keep things simple for the user I decided to use an IFrame to show the lists of vacancies, trainees and targets in the relevant entities. This was because I felt the company would benefit from having this information in line with the main application form rather than jumping about the categories in the left hand pane.

So using the IIS logs I tracked down the URL for each of these lists so that they can be included in the Iframe source. It turns out that they have a relatively straight forward format. Each of the lists differed only by the value of the tabSet at the end of the line (assuming we don't count the object id because it is being passed as a variable anyway).

I also work with two shortcuts on my desk, one to take me to CRM and one to take me direct to the Loader.aspx page so that I can view page sources. This gave me the ability to find the ID for each of the menu entries in the left hand pane relating to the lists themselves. For simplicity I will remove them to avoid confusion. Lastly I did not want to waste time trying to display anything when I was creating a new account.

So the code for the account form was :


document.all.nav_account_new_vacancies.removeNode(true);
document.all.nav_account_new_trainees.removeNode(true);

if (crmForm.FormType == 1)
{
document.all.IFRAME_recruitment.src="about:blank";
document.all.IFRAME_trainees.src="about:blank";
}
else
{
document.all.IFRAME_recruitment.src="/sfa/accts/areas.aspx?oId=" + crmForm.ObjectId + "&oType=1&security=852407&tabSet=account_new_vacancies";
document.all.IFRAME_trainees.src="/sfa/accts/areas.aspx?oId=" + crmForm.ObjectId + "&oType=1&security=852407&tabSet=account_new_trainees";
}


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