Inteliisense is one of the features I can’t
live without. Since JavaScript Intellisense was not available for CRM Object
Model I always struggled with it. With CRM 2011 release Microsoft has made life
a bit easy by providing a solution to enable intellisense on the CRM Object
Model. Here’s how you can enable it in your development environment
1) Install
the visual studio JScript editor extension from here.
2) Install
the extension XrmPageScriptDevelopmentProjectCS.vsix which comes with CRM SDK. This is available in
\sdk\templates\xrm.pagescriptprojecttemplate folder in your SDK install
location. You need to install xrmpagescriptdevelopmentprojectvb.vsix if VB.NET
is your language of choice.
3) Import
the XrmPageScriptDevelopmentFormSnapshot_1_0_0_0_managed.zip as a
solution into your CRM development box.
You can find this file in the same folder where you found the vsix file
i.e. \sdk\templates\xrm.pagescriptprojecttemplate
4) Once
you have done this create a new project using the template you installed in
step 2.
5) This
will create a project template for you. The template will look like the
following in your solution explorer
6) The
files XrmPageTemplate.js and PageData.js are the files which are responsible to
provide you the IntelliSense in Visual Studio. While the files My.Library.js
and My_Library.js are the ones where you can write your own code.
7 ) But
before you try to write code you need to do a little trick to have the
IntelliSense working correctly. Let’s say that you want to write java script
for the Accounts form. Go to CRM UI and open the form for which you want to
write script. You will see another button in the customize ribbon. Like the one
shown below (Xrm.Page.Snapshot)
8) Click
on this button and you’d see a dialog box like the following. Select event as
None and click “Get Data”
9) Copy
the text in the textbox and paste it into PageData.js file in the project you
had created in step 4. Save the file.
10) You
are all set to write a javascript function which can be called on the Account
Form now. Let’s write a function fire onChange event of name attribute on the
account form.
Start typing and intellisense should support you
as shown in the screenshot below.
11) Note
that you won’t get the Intellisense when you try to type the name of the
attribute. But if you type it wrong you won’t get page specific intellisense on
the nameAttribute variable you typed. See the screenshot below to find what
happens if you type the wrong name.
12) If
you type the right name you get proper intellisense which tells you what you
could do with this attribute e.g. fire an onChange event for this attribute as shown
below
13)One
of the limitations of above solution is that you can’t use the intellisense on
eventArgs i.e. if you want to work within the context of an event. In order to
enable that you need to repeat steps 7 through 9 and select the appropriate even
in the dialog box which pops up in step 8.
There are some limitations to this solution.
E.g. the intellisense support will stop if you try to call a chain of
functions. It will stop working when you try to do a Boolean calculation within
an if statement as well. There might be more. So trust Intellisense to some
extent and there’s still no way to say that if Intellisense doesn’t show it
then it’s not there J.
You can also do some amount of testing based on
this project. I’ll keep it reserved for another post.
No comments:
Post a Comment