Adding menu items for specific views
Here’s how to add a menu item in CRM to a specific view – e.g. a “Closed Opportunities” menu item that when clicked takes the user to the Opportunity view has the Closed Opportunities view displayed rather than the default view.
Here’s a screenshot where I’ve added a new menu item to a custom view of Hot Opportunities for my sales managers:
1. Determine the URL of the view you want a menu item for, by using CRM’s Copy Link feature. E.g. If you want the URL of the Closed Opportunities view:
a. Go to the Opportunities list view and select the Closed Opportunities view from the View dropdown
b. From the More Actions menu select: Copy Shortcut à Of Current View
c. Open Word or Notepad and from the Edit menu select Paste
d. This will give you something like this:
Closed Opportunities
Note: there are 3 ‘layers’ to this URL:
- The first section of the URL provides the address to your CRM system,
e.g.: http://gtapp3/CRMArchitects/_root/homepage.aspx?etc=3&viewid=%7b00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010003006%7d
- If we just launched this URL then CRM would open and the default entity view would appear.
- We don’t actually need this part of the URL, the Sitemap will add this for us if it is not present and it is better to do this as the sitemap will then be able to deployed to other environments.
- The second part is the URL provides the address to a specific entity’s list view,
e.g.: http://gtapp3/CRMArchitects/_root/homepage.aspx?etc=3&viewid=%7b00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010003006%7d
- If we launch this URL then CRM would open and the entity specified by the ‘etc’ parameter would be displayed. The default view of that entity would be displayed.
- The 3rd part is an optional parameter that will allow a specific view to be displayed (it refers to the unique GUID assigned to the view):
e.g.: http://gtapp3/CRMArchitects/_root/homepage.aspx?etc=3&viewid=%7b00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010003006%7d
- This is what we wanted. Now we have a URL that once pinned behind a menu item in the SiteMap will allow our users to have one-click access to a specific view.
- Given we don’t need the first part of the URL, the URL that we want is:
/_root/homepage.aspx?etc=3&viewid=%7b00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010003006%7d
- But there’s a trick required here, because our URL has a & in it we have to do one little fiddle. Replace that & with &
e.g.: /_root/homepage.aspx?etc=3&viewid=%7b00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010003006%7d
Now you may have hit an issue back when you tried to copy the shortcut to the view.
- CRM does not always let you copy the shortcut of a view, sometimes you will be told “Shortcut for the selected view is not available”. I think you get this on the ‘My’ views – e.g. “My Opportunities”, “My Appointments”.
- I’m not sure if you can get around this by having a look in the database and determining the GUID of the view and then building the URL up from that. That might be a solution.
- When I hit this limitation, I was able to get around it by making the view I wanted the default view for the entity. I then used a less specific URL, e.g. http://gtapp3/CRMArchitects/_root/homepage.aspx?etc=3 which would just takes the user to the entity’s list view, where my view shows by default. Of course you won’t always be able to solve this limitation this way.
Back to the sitemap…
2. Add a new SubArea node for your new menu item, e.g.:
<SubArea Id="nav_closedopps" Entity="opportunity" Title="Closed Opportunities" Url="/_root/homepage.aspx?etc=3&viewid=%7b00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010003006%7d " />
Note:
- The SubArea ID is something you make up. It must be unique in your sitemap file.
- The Title is whatever you want displayed on the navigation menu.
- The URL is where you paste your URL (remember to drop off the prefix)
4. That’s it! Now, import your sitemap and then refresh your browser and you should see your new menu item.
