Show Activities Tab when clicking on a custom navigation link - dynamics-crm-2011

Question

I am working on a customisation for CRM 2011. I have created a custom entity (which is based on activity so is an activity type aswell), created the relationship to account and on the account form created a custom navigation link pointing to a web resource which will power the custom display (this is just a html page with JavaScript).
The Web resource is used instead of a standard relationship link because it is doing a listings and preview display and not just the list view that the out of the box feature provides.
What i am trying to do is show the activities tab (the activities ribbon tab) on the accounts form, whenever the custom navigation link is pressed and a user goes into that section, in the same way it displays when you click the activities navigation link. I can't seem to find that much information on Tab Display Rules as i think that is the place (if this is possible) that it should be done.
Also, if there is a JavaScript way of doing it (although i have not found any) then that would work as well.

Answer 1

We have a solution.
DISCLAIMER This solution is not recommended (or supported) as it is a complete hack of epic proportions, but it solved the issue for us. this is a temporary bit of functionality as we build out a custom solution which will better fit the client, so it will not be there moving forwards which is why the hack worked for us. Additionally, a scripts could be written much better, we simply wanted to get it out the door.
NOTE: This solution will use some external libraries such as JQuery & CRM FetchKit
1) Adding a relationship to the custom object and account
We have a custom entity, and we created a 1:N relationship from the Account entity to our custom entity. What this does enables us to do is create a navigation link on the account form which points to an associated view of our custom entity. Once the link is in, we save and publish changes.
2) Get the id of the new navigation link created
The link above should now be on the form, so after saving and publishing we go to the live view and using the IE developer tools we get the id of the link as we need to catch the onclick and do some things with it later.
3) Decorating the onclick of the navigation link created
We have the id so and we want to decorate the onclick with some additional functionality. We create 2 new web resources:
"YourCustomEntity"_init : Javascript Web Resource: this will be used in the onload of the account form to get the link we created and alter the onclick to do some additional things
YourCustomEntity_page : HTML Page Web Resource: As per the original question, we have a additional requirement of showing a preview pane which is why we couldn't use the standard grid
Code for "YourCustomEntity"_init
Code is pretty basic and doesn't have any object caching or the like it was simply written to solve our problem. I have added comments to the code. Also Entity is a generic name, this was the name of our custom type. We set the original associated view to hidden instead of display:none because we still need it to load in the background as this is where the ribbon gets updated and loads, so there is definitely some script going on to do this, wish we knew it so we could just use that :)
function previewEntityInit(){
//Catch any navigation link click, we need this because we need to hide our
//grid when we are not on the custom entity page
$('.ms-crm-Nav-Subarea-Link, .ms-crm-FormSelector-SubItem').click(function () {
//Get the id of the link clicked and the frame injected object
var id = $(this).attr('id'),
cFrame = $('#entity_frame_preview');
//if the frame has already been injected
if(cFrame.length !== 0) {
//If we are not in the correct section
//(i.e. activities nav link was clicked) hide it
if (id !== 'nav_new_account_new_entity') {
cFrame.attr('style', 'display:none;');
}
else{
//The correct link was clicked, so show it
cFrame.attr('style', 'display:block; width:100%; height:100%;');
$('#new_account_new_entityFrame').attr('style', 'visibility: hidden;');
}
}
else{
//This is the first time the correct link has been clicked
//So we hide the default associated view and inject our
//own iframe point to the YourCustomEntity_page embedded resource we created
var src = Xrm.Page.context.getServerUrl();
if (id === 'nav_new_account_new_entity') {
$('#new_account_new_entityFrame').attr('style', 'visibility: hidden;');
$('<iframe />', {
id: 'entity_frame_preview',
src: src + '/WebResources/new_entity_page',
width: '100%',
height: '100%'
}).prependTo('#tdAreas');
}
}
});
YourCustomEntity_page
Not going to show all the code here, but we based ours on this link:
Preview Form Link
We changed it in the following ways:
Only the view name is hardcodes, the rest is taken via code (code below)
We don't use the second iframe opting instead to have a simple HTML section which loaded this (code for this and our load function below)
No Hard Coded Values
var server = Xrm.Page.context.getServerUrl();
var orgName = "";
// grid related settings
var entityId = window.parent.Xrm.Page.data.entity.getId();
var entityType = "1";
var areaView = "new_account_new_entity";
var internalGridElement = "crmGrid_new_account_new_entity";
var timeoutKey = null;
HTML For Preview
<div id="previewForm" style="display: none;">
<ol>
<li><span class="lbl">Account:</span><span id="lblAccount"></span></li>
<li><span class="lbl">Created:</span><span id="lblDate"></span></li>
<li><span class="lbl">Regarding:</span><span id="lblRegarding"></span></li>
<li><span class="lbl">Owner:</span><span id="lblOwner"></span></li>
</ol>
<div id="subject">
<span class="lbl">Subject:</span><span id="lblSubject" class="value"></span>
</div>
<div>
<span id="lblMsg"></span>
</div>
</div>
LoadPreview Code
This uses an external library called CRMFetchKit. The code actually does three fetch calls, this is not ideal and it should be one really (using joins, google it :)), but this wasn't working and was dragging so we decided just to go with three as this whole section will be replaced with a managed solution soon.
function LoadPreviewPane(entity) {
if (entity != null) {
$('#previewForm').show();
var fetchxml = ['<fetch version="1.0" output-format="xml-platform" mapping="logical" distinct="false">',
' <entity name="new_entity">',
'<attribute name="subject" />',
'<attribute name="description" />',
'<attribute name="createdon" />',
'<attribute name="new_account" />',
'<attribute name="ownerid" />',
' <filter type="and">',
' <condition attribute="activityid" operator="eq" value="' + entity.Id + '" />',
' </filter>',
' </entity>',
'</fetch>'].join('');
CrmFetchKit.Fetch(fetchxml).then(function (results) {
var account = window.parent.Xrm.Page.getAttribute("name").getValue(),
subject = results[0].getValue('subject'),
desc = results[0].getValue('description'),
created = new Date(results[0].getValue('createdon')),
theDate = created.getDate() + "/" + (created.getMonth() + 1) + "/" + created.getFullYear(),
owner = '',
regarding = '';
var fetchxml2 = ['<fetch version="1.0" output-format="xml-platform" mapping="logical" distinct="false">',
' <entity name="systemuser">',
'<attribute name="fullname" />',
' <filter type="and">',
' <condition attribute="systemuserid" operator="eq" value="' + results[0].getValue('ownerid') + '" />',
' </filter>',
' </entity>',
'</fetch>'].join('');
CrmFetchKit.Fetch(fetchxml2).then(function (users) {
owner = users[0].getValue('fullname');
$('#lblOwner').html(owner);
});
var fetchxml3 = ['<fetch version="1.0" output-format="xml-platform" mapping="logical" distinct="false">',
' <entity name="account">',
'<attribute name="name" />',
' <filter type="and">',
' <condition attribute="accountid" operator="eq" value="' + results[0].getValue('new_accountname') + '" />',
' </filter>',
' </entity>',
'</fetch>'].join('');
CrmFetchKit.Fetch(fetchxml3).then(function (regardings) {
regarding = regardings[0].getValue('name');
$('#lblRegarding').html(regarding);
});
$('#lblAccount').html(account);
$('#lblSubject').html(subject);
$('#lblMsg').html(nl2br(desc));
$('#lblDate').html(theDate);
});
}
}