A macros system for Dynamics CRM - part two

In part one of this series, I explained the basic idea of what a macros system for Dynamics CRM is and a situation in which you'd want to use it instead of a workflow for process automation. In this post I'll explain the structure of the macros system and show the CRM entity form customizations that will be required to implement it.

As I mentioned in part one, the idea underlying the macros system is that a user can trigger several distinct steps by clicking a single hyperlink. We achieve this by showing the user, via an iframe on the entity form, a page of hyperlinks specific to a given entity type. The macros page will also need to know the specific entity its actions will target. This requires the following:

1. An iframe on the entity form in CRM.
2. JavaScript code to load the macros page in CRM. (This isn't strictly required, but you'll get ugly errors in the create entity form if you specify the iframe URL directly.)
3. A separate Web page per entity that will offer macros to do the work.

The iframe properties general tab

Note that we don't specify a URL for the iframe here. Also note that we have to allow cross-frame scripting.

The iframe properties formatting tab

Formatting has nothing to do with the functionality of the macros, but the formatting options shown here help maintain the illusion that the macros are part of the CRM application as opposed to something separate. Note that if you have a lot of macros, the no-scroll option will be a problem.

if ((crmForm.ObjectId != null)&&(crmForm.ObjectId))
{
  var policyId = crmForm.ObjectId.replace("{","").replace("}","");
  var macrosite = "http://PATH_TO_MACROS_PAGES/policy_macros.aspx?guid=" + policyId;
  
  crmForm.all.IFRAME_macros.src = macrosite;
}