NEIL PARKHURST

I have previously mentioned how to display multiple pages in a single tab within Unified Service Desk (USD) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

In this post I will quickly cover this again and expand on the concept to explain the CloseActive action.

Often you’ll use multiple pages in conjunction with CRM Pages, for example, you may have several contacts for an account. Enabling multiple pages on the contact’s hosted control allows the creation of a drop down making it each for the user to navigate from page to page.

In this example, I’m going to do something slightly different. I have enabled multiple pages on a hosted control I use for displaying standard webpages. In my application I have created a prototype concept to allow the user to quickly access multiple web pages.

Below you can see a screen shot from my application in which I have a tab that contains three websites. I’ve also added a navigation bar to provide a browser line experience. I’m not going to cover the total detail of my customizations in this post as I’d like to focus on the Multiple Pages aspect and CloseActive. (But if this concept interests anyone I could be persuaded to do a longer post explaining my complete solution in greater detail. J)

For now, I’d just like to point out the drop down menu containing the three websites. Making my hosted control capable of this was easy.

On my hosted control, you can see that I have changed the allow multiple page option to yes. And set the maximum browsers to 6. This is all that is needed to enable the multiple page navigation on a hosted control.

Also notice that my USD Component type is “Standard Web Application”, as I’m displaying standard web pages.

I found that the CloseActive UII Action wasn’t present by default on a Standard Web Application hosted control. But I believe it does exist on a CRMPage by default. If you need to add the uii action, simply load you hosted control, navigate to Uii Actions and add a new one called “CloseActive”.

Next you will need to create an action to call this Uii Action. Mine looked like this ….

Nothing complicated here, I just enter the hosted control name and set the action to CloseActive. It is worth noting that “Close” and “CloseActive” are very similar. On a hosted control that doesn’t support multiple pages they do the same thing. The manual described CloseActive like this;

“Closes the active window in this hosted control. If the active window is the only window displayed in the hosted control, the control itself will be closed. For Microsoft Dynamics CRM pages that don’t allow multiple pages, this is equivalent to the Close action. ”

I guess I should next describe how I used this action, in my navigation toolbar I added an “X”. Clicking this would close the web page current being displayed. Whilst clicking on the tabs “X” would close the entire tab.

My toolbar button looked like this, you can see that this simply calls the action I created to close the active tab.

Hopefully this idea has given you an example of how multiple pages might be used on something other than a CRMPage. And also demonstrated the concept of how a CloseActive action might be used. J