I recently had a requirement in Unified Service Desk (USD) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 to implement advanced find capabilities into my interface.

Advanced find is a useful tool but in terms of USD it presented me a problem! My USD interface was pre-configured to open sessions for common entities like contact, account and lead. If the user selected any of these from the advanced find results I would want a session to open and my agent scripts (etc) to kick in as normal. BUT, with advanced find I can’t control what entities the user may view. It may even be that someone adds a custom entity that I am completely unaware of. So how could I cope with this diversity in USD?

In this post I will explain how I achieved this ….

1. Create a hosted control to hold the advanced find.
2. Create an action
3. Create a toolbar button
4. Create some window navigation rules

Step One – Create a hosted control

I wanted a separate window to pop-up for my advanced find. So I created the hosted control shown below.

Step Two – Create an Action

I would need an action to load the advanced find dialog in my hosted control.

Step Three – Create a toolbar button

I already had a main toolbar that contained options to search by account, lead etc. So I added a toolbar button to that. My button looked like this;

Below you can see what my button looked like. Notice that the show tab has been set to “Advanced Find” and that I have added the action created in step two.

I uploaded a search icon as a web resource and used that in my toolbar. This is optional, you could just leave the image line blank.

Step Four – Window Navigation rules.

This bit confused some people! You may need to tweak these rules to fit into your existing navigation rule structure.

The behaviour I decided I wanted was that is a user selected an account, contact or lead I would open a session as normal. But if they selected anything else from the advanced find tab the entity would load outside of USD. Allowing them to select anything but also meaning I kept control of my key entities.

The sequence was important. I need to check for the three entities I was interested in first. Then and only then fire a default rule that would load anything else in a tab outside of USD.

My rules are shown below;

My account, contact and lead rules all followed the same structure.

Next I needed a rule to open anything else outside of USD.

Now when I select Advanced Find I get a pop-up containing the advanced find dialog. This works as it would normally in CRM. But when I select the results tab, if I open an account, contact or lead they open in USD. But if I select anything else a browser loads outside of USD containing my results.

This turned out to be a quick and useful addition to my USD interface.
J