CRM 2011 Developer Tip o’the Day: Customization Navigation

I am going to admit up front I may be the only person using CRM 2011 to have this problem, but just in case there is another developer out there, I wanted to share a little best practice that I have taught myself.

When navigating the CRM 2011 customization treeview it is easy to become distracted and loose your place – especially if you have added a large number of custom entities.

Tip #1: Collapse an entity’s tree after you have finished working on it.

This will visually remove the Entity from your view.

Tip #2: Before you get excited and starting working on an Entity, make sure the Entity name at the top-left-hand corner of the screen matches the entity you have expanded and wish to work on.

Here is an example of what can happen when you don’t check:

As you can see, I want to work on Contact, but Account is what has been selected.

I have been caught in this situation several times and while I’ve never done anything that caused data loss I did waste unnecessary time.

Remember, software does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.