Many Dynamics Solutions have a key transactional entity that will contain a number of useful Views.
However whenever we browse to this Entity, we will be presented with the Default View for that Entity – and so the User must complete a 2nd click to open the View that they may be interested in.
This can make our solution more difficult to use as adds an extra click to get to the right view.
This problem can be tackled via Dashboards in Dynamics, but this adds a Requirement to create a new Dashboard Definition for what can be a simple click-to-specific-view requirement.
We can solve this problem in a different view by modifying our SiteMap to add areas that display a specific View as way of allowing Users to more quickly access this View.
To do this, we can follow these steps:
Get the GUID ID of the System View – every View in Dynamics has a Unique ID formatted as a GUID, and we need to obtain this ID to include the View in our SiteMap.
We can find this GUID ID by opening the System View from our Dynamics Customisation Area and pressing CTRL N to open the View in a new Browser Window with the full Request String.
We can copy this Request String into Note Pad and find the GUID ID:
This will look something like:
The %7b and %7d segments represent { and } characters and can be striped out.
We can then obtain our View GUID ID: 56DFB4D3-0207-E211-8C73-00155D45039A
Build the URL to this View – In Dynamics we can open this View via a specific URL.
We do this by building the URL that would open the View in the following format:
/_root/homepage.aspx?etn=[our Entity Database Name]&viewid=[our View GUID ID]
So in our example, the following URL will open the specific View for the Case/Incident Entity in Dynamics:
NOTE: Oddly Dynamics will still show the Name of the Default View (in the example above, My Cases) but the Columns and Appearance coming from our intended View as specified by the View GUID ID.
Use the SiteMap Editor to embed this URL in Dynamics – We can now link this together by opening the SiteMap Editor in Dynamics and adding a new Subgroup that opens our specific View URL.
We do this by adding a new Subarea in to the SiteMap Editor and specifying with:
Type: URL
URL: The URL we have constructed to point to our System View in Dynamics
Once this is published, this will then let the User access this View directly from the SiteMap, and so reduce the number of clicks required to open a particular view.
This is often very useful in that Key Transactional Entity that may have several useful Views over a single Default View – and we can now represent each View as a different area in the SiteMap for quick ease of use.
