USD – Multiple tabs for one entity

Within Unified Service Desk (USD) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM typically each entity in a session loads into one tab. But what if you’d like to open multiple tabs for the same entity? This would be difficult right???? Actually it is pretty simple, as I will explain in this post.

For example, when looking at a contact to load a new tab for each case viewed for that contact.

One complexity for this change will be how to handle operators closing tabs. As if a tab is closed I’d want to “reuse” it should another case be opened.

My approach to this change involved the following steps;

1. Create some hosted controls
   
2. Create some actions and add to events on the hosted controls
   
3. Create some window navigation rules
   

Step One – Create some hosted controls

In my example I will create three hosted controls, one for each tab I’d like to open. You could create more is needed. I called them Incident 1, Incident 2 and Incident 3.

Incident 1 and Incident 2 have almost the same settings.

If you like you could repeat this logic for more tabs. However, many tabs you have the last one will look slightly different. The final tab will be my catch all. My final hosted control looked like this;

Step Two – Create some actions and add to events on the hosted controls

This next step was to cope with the fact the users could close tabs and I wanted to re-use them. On my incident 1 and incident 2 hosted controls I needed to clear the data parameters if they were closed. So that the tab would be reused.

To do this I created two actions. I have shown the incident 1 action below. My incident 2 “version” is exactly the same! (Note: I didn’t need one for my final tab, so no incident 3!)

Once I had my actions I needed to add them to an event on each hosted control. The event I needed wasn’t present out of the box. So I created it. Below you can see that on Incident 1 I used the ADD NEW EVENT option and created an event called “Closing”.

Having created the closing event, I added my action to this event.

Meaning I ended up with a closing event on my Incident 1 and Incident 2 hosted controls. And on each I called a ClearDataParameter action.

Step Three – Create some window navigation rules

Finally I needed three window navigation rules to govern the loading of these tabs. (As shown below.)

The order is VERY important here. As I want to load something into incident 1 first, then incident 2 and finally incident 3.

Once completed I could load cases in multiple tabs as shown below. Including having multiple pages on my final tab. Plus if I closed a case in the first or second tabs, opening another case will reuse that tab.

I hope this example helps you understand how multiple tabs can be used for a single entity in USD.
J