NEIL PARKHURST

Whilst “playing” around in Unified Service Desk (USD) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 I spotted an action I hadn’t seen before, LaunchURL.

I believe this action might have been added in the last release of USD v2.1.0.556. Either that or I simply hadn’t noticed it before!

I expected to see the action documented in the Unified Service Desk developers guide. But under the predefined actions for Global Manager I couldn’t find any information. At least not at the tim of creating this post, hopefully it will be added at some point.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn864978.aspx

So, what does this action do and when might you use it?

It seems pretty simple, it launches a URL (as the name suggests). But it does this in very specific way.

Whatever URL is specified is loaded in Internet Explorer outside of USD, without triggering the window navigation rules.

I created the test action shown below. Notice that my hosted control is my global manager and the action is LaunchURL. Also note that the data portion contains a url.

Running this action did as I expected and loaded the BBC’s home page in an Internet Explorer window. Checking what happens in the debugger confirms that no window navigation rules were triggered.

Also it was obvious that the page had loaded outside of USD. Meaning if I closed Unified Service Desk the page I’d launched remained open.

This action is great if you simply want to load a web page or application from USD. And you don’t want to worry about creating window navigation rules etc.

This Hopefully you might find this action useful. J