Changing full-name format in System Settings

Did you ever wonder what would happen if you changed the order of how names of Contacts appeared in the system?  What happens if you already have records that you want the change to effect?

Well, unfortunately, this is an area for improvement in CRM 4.0 and we expect v.Next to partially accommodate some of it.

The long and the short of things is that while we have the ability to alter Find Fields for the Single lookup windows of entities, the Multi-lookup is hidden so we're forced to use system default fields for those lookup windows.  For example, in the Contact entity, we can designate the single lookup to also search by email address, last name, nickname, etc., but these settings do not apply to the multi-lookup window.  This can make for a confusing user environment.

I recently had a group of users decide that to circumvent this shortcoming between single- and multi-lookup, they would change the sort order of the Contact names in System Settings.  Sounds easy enough, right?  But noooo....we get a warning that the change is only applicable for newly created records!

After a little testing, we found that if we temporarily changed any part of what the system uses for the fullname value, saved the record, then changed it back to the original value and saved again, the new naming format would apply.

Unfortunately, it required actually having the window open.  Workflows didn't work and the fullname field cannot be updated via the SDK!

Luckily, the client only had a thousand or so records, so we used the following simple OnLoad script for the Contact form and engaged in lots of double clicking.  In the end, though, we got our desired results which was to have the new fullname format applied to existing records so the Last name value could be used in the search windows without being forced to prepend it with the wildcard when in a multi-lookup window!

if (crmForm.all.firstname.DataValue == "x")
{
crmForm.all.firstname.DataValue = crmForm.all.middlename.DataValue;
crmForm.all.middlename.DataValue = null;
crmForm.SaveAndClose();
}
else
{
crmForm.all.middlename.DataValue = crmForm.all.firstname.DataValue;
crmForm.all.firstname.DataValue = "x";
crmForm.Save();
}