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Thursday, April 22, 2010

I've entered the xRM Showcase Challenge

Today I visited the Microsoft CRM Team Blog to find a perfect venue to promote and increase the visibility of the Javascript Grid Editor.  The xRM Showcase Challenge is a great way for me to gauge the demand for this project, and serves as an excellent platform for announcing the project to the world.

While I've received numerous compliments and much help on the project during the first few months it has been available, I'm more motivated now to improve the project by tackling my list of outstanding features and bugs.  If you like the project and use it in your CRM deployments, I would like to encourage you to give me a vote.

Once again, I'd like to personally thank those of you who have contacted me personally about the project and who have helped me identify ways to improve it.  Without your help, I would not enjoy the sense of achievement I currently have.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Integer fields and the Javascript Grid Editor

Well, I've done it.  I've added another exception to the JGE code to fix missing Metadata information on custom entities.  Seriously, Microsoft?  Your Metadata is so clean and nice with the system entities.  But the missing information you're assuming is intuitive on custom entities rather perturbs both my code, and me.

I made a comment on my post yesterday about the situation, and the cause.  I won't rehash it here.  In any case, those implementers who had troubles with the code in conjunction with Integer fields on custom entities should grab version 1.0.5 of the code, fresh from the oven.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Owner fields and the Javascript Grid Editor

Since the release of my Javascript Grid Editor project, I've been blessed and blessed again by helpful and constructive contributors and developers helping me locate bugs and implementation-specific considerations.  One of the most annoying to date, has been the incompatibility of the script with Owner-type fields.

To be honest, I don't use Owner fields in my implementations of the script personally, so I was rather taken back to discover that the metadata for Owner-fields does not include a "Targets" node with information pointing to the "systemuser" entity, as every other Lookup in CRM does.  This troubles me because I'm fully aware that CRM 5 will introduce team-based ownership, and I anticipate they will use the "Targets" descriptor in the metadata to delineate ownership by either "systemuser" or "team" entities.

I've included a fix for this in the most recent update of my code, and published version 1.0.4 to the repository.  The fix operates during the retrieval of the metadata, and checks each attribute to determine two conditions: 1.) that it's an "Owner" attribute, and 2.) that no Targets were located.  If these conditions are met, the RetrieveEntity() function simply creates a single-target reference to the "systemuser" entity--which should fix the problem in all areas of the script.

I hope this bug hasn't precluded the implementation or deployment of the JGE to any CRM deployment that needs it, but if it has, please grab the latest version of the script and try it out!