Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Scrolling Announcements on Home Page for CRM 4.0

Lately, I've started looking into problems people face when dealing with CRM. Well it is a part of my job and provides me a great learning opportunity.

A day or two before I got this requirement : The end user wanted to scroll Announcements[CRM entity : newsarticle] on top of home page. I made a simple script which can be used. This one fetches all Announcements so you might want to set some filters like expiry date or active on date.

Here are the steps to scroll announcement on CRM Home page. Kindly note that I do not take any responsibility if something goes wrong with this approach.
1. Go to CRMWeb\_root\ and take backup of bar_top.aspx and keep it safe somewhere. In case things goes wrong, you will need it to restore things back.
2. Open bar_top.aspx in Visual Studio
3. Add the following code snippet at the end of the file.

<!-- SCRIPT BEGIN : Scroll Announcements -->

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
window.attachEvent('onload', ScrollAnnouncement);

function ScrollAnnouncement() {
var xml = "" +
"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>" +
"<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=\"
http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\" xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\">"
+ GenerateAuthenticationHeader()
+
" <soap:Body>" +
" <Execute xmlns=\"
http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices\">" +
" <Request xsi:type=\"RetrieveMultipleRequest\" ReturnDynamicEntities=\"true\">" +
" <Query xmlns:q1=\"
http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/Query\" xsi:type=\"q1:QueryExpression\">" +
" <q1:EntityName>businessunitnewsarticle</q1:EntityName>" +
" <q1:ColumnSet xsi:type=\"q1:ColumnSet\">" +
" <q1:Attributes>" +
" <q1:Attribute>articletitle</q1:Attribute>" +
" </q1:Attributes>" +
" </q1:ColumnSet>" +
" <q1:Distinct>false</q1:Distinct>" +
" </Query>" +
" </Request>" +
" </Execute>" +
" </soap:Body>" +
"</soap:Envelope>" +
"";

var xmlHttpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");

xmlHttpRequest.Open("POST", "/mscrmservices/2007/CrmService.asmx", false);
xmlHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("SOAPAction", "
http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices/Execute");
xmlHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8");
xmlHttpRequest.setRequestHeader("Content-Length", xml.length);
xmlHttpRequest.send(xml);

var resultXml = xmlHttpRequest.responseXML;

var entityNode = resultXml.selectNodes("//BusinessEntities")[0];
var marqueeHTML = "<marquee class='ms-crm-MastHead-SignIn-User'>";
for (var i = 0; i < entityNode.childNodes.length; i++) {
if (i == 0) {
marqueeHTML += entityNode.childNodes[i].childNodes[0].childNodes[0].text
} else {
marqueeHTML += "&nbsp; &nbsp; " + entityNode.childNodes[i].childNodes[0].childNodes[0].text;
}
}
marqueeHTML += "<marquee>";

var headerTD = document.getElementById("tdLogoMastHeadBar");
headerTD.innerHTML += marqueeHTML;
}
</script>

<!-- SCRIPT END : Scroll Announcements -->


4. Check on home page.
You will see a scrolling marquee of the announcements title on CRM Header.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,

We have IFD installed on our prodcution environment. Could you pls let me know how to change the text from contact your MS CRM administrator to "Contact helpdesk" in signin.aspx

Many thanks in advance

Chinmay said...

Hi Shilpa,

Sorry for the delayed response. Some recent events have kept me real busy. Now coming to the answer, you will have to write a script that replaces that text. It involves editing the ASPX file. If you are ok with that then all you need to do is, to write a script at the end of the ASPX which onLoad of the page will replace the Contact Your MS CRM Administrator with Contact Helpdesk. It is a really simple script, I don’t have access to any IFD deployment right now, so I am not able to provide the exact script. Let me know, if you need help with the script.

Regards,
Chinmay