Within Unified Service Desk (USD) a session is effectively a group of related tabs.
Multiple sessions can be opened at any one time meaning sessions give a useful way of being able to work on multiple customers at the same time. When the phones are going mad, I’ve often seen call centre operators need to work on multiple customer records simultaneously.
In future posts I will explain how to open additional tabs within a session but lets start with the basic steps needed to create a session in the first place.
Typically you’ll start off by searching for a customer (or anything) then after selecting the customer a session will be opened. This is achieved by first creating a hosted control(s) to hold the session and tabs, then session lines are created to name the session. Finally a windows navigation rule will be created to govern when the session will be required.
Session create steps;
- Create a hosted control to display in the session
- If needed create a session tab hosted control.
- Create a session line to name the session.
- Create a window navigation rule that will start the session as required.
Step One – Created a hosted control to display in the session
Each entity that you need to have a session for will need a hosted control. These may differ from others you’ve created already as they won’t be global. (As they will exist only within the session!)
Navigate to the hosted controls section of Unified Service Desk settings and add a new hosted control.
Sorry my example is going to be related to fishing (again!) but you can add a hosted control for any CRM entity. (Custom or System.)
Name: Fishing Location
Display Name: [[new_fishinglocation.new_name]] (This will set the name of the tab to equal the name of the fishing location, yours will differ depending on the entity you are working with.)
USD Component Type: CRMPage
Allow Multiple Pages: No (I will cover how / when you’d use multiple pages in another post.)
Hosting Type: InternalWPF
Application is Global: This a NOT selected.
Display Group: MainPanel (I guess you could use RightPanel but typically sessions will always be in the MainPanel.)
Step Two – If needed create a session tab hosted control.
If you have already used session they you’ll probably already have a session tab hosted control, if not you’ll need to create one. To do this navigation to the hosted control section of the Unified Service Desk settings and add a new control.
You will use the same session tabs hosted control for all your sessions regardless of their type.
Name: Session Tabs
USD Component Type: Session Tabs
Step Three – Create a session line to name the session.
There are two types of session lines, “Session Name” and “Session Overview Line”. I will cover the overview lines in a future post.
Session overview lines are used to display a summary of the entity being shown in the session in the left panel’s overview area. For now we’ll just do the minimum and create a session line to name the session.
Navigation to the Session Lines part of the Unified Service Desk settings and create a new session line.
Name: “Fishing Location” (Or name of whatever entity you are using.)
Selected Entity: “new_fishinglocation” (This is the CRM scheme name for the entity you want to display, the list of entity names is actually specific to USD! Meaning if you are working on an entity for the first time you may need to add it at this point.)
Type: Session Name
Display: “[[new_fishinglocation.new_name]]” (This is the name that will be given to the session, naming it like this means each session with have the name of the fishing location being viewed.
Step Four – Create a window navigation rule that will start the session as required.
If you haven’t yet used window navigation rules a little explanation might be needed here! A window navigation rule governs how you want tabs (etc) within USD to behave. For example: Whenever you select an account from a tab containing the search results open a session for that account.
In my example, I have already created a list of fishing locations within a tab. Now if I select any of those I want a session to open. (I will cover creating search screens in USD in another post.) Essentially the logic I describe here could work from any tab with a list of anything within it. Meaning you could trigger a session opening from a dashboard, associated view or find view.
Navigate to the window navigate rules area of the Unified Service Desk settings and opt to create a new navigation rule.
Name: “Fishing Locations Session Rule”
Order: “200” (Mandatory field!)
From: “Search” (In my example I have a hosted control called Search, within that I show a view of fishing locations. This field could be set to any hosted control you have that contains list of something you want to open a session on.)
Entity: new_fishinglocation (Create a new one if your entity can’t be found.)
Route Type: “Popup”
Action: “Create Session”
Destination: “Tab”
Target Tab: “Fishing Locations” (This will be the hosted control you created in step one.)
Show Tab: “Fishing Locations” (Set the same as the target tab.)
Hide Command Bar: I have selected No.
Hide Navigation Bar: I have selected Yes.
In my example I have opted to show the command bar but hide the navigation bar. For me this is a common combination. The command bar includes commands like “Save” etc. I tend to want those! The blue navigation is sometimes still needed if you want the operator to navigate away from the entity being shown but commonly I remove this effectively restricting navigation to the entity currently being shown.
So you are all done, load USD and test the application.
Above you can see how in my test application I have two sessions open. Now you’ve managed to open a session you’ll want to consider many more alterations including;
- Creating a toolbar within the session.
- Opening additional tabs in the session.
- Configuring agent scripts associated with the session.
- etc.
I will cover these topics in future posts!
Microsoft Dynamics 365 
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