One of the primary sources of traffic to my blog comes from my CRM 4 Grid Editor utility. Every day, it seems, some new visitor lands on my blog (according to Google Analytics) looking for this project. It seems to me, then, that the sooner I can update the utility to work with CRM 2011, the less disappointed these visitors may be.
First and foremost, I’d like to make a solemn announcement: I will no longer continue development on the CRM 4 Grid Editor. It’s reign started rather late in the CRM 4 life-cycle, and now that we’re well into CRM 2011’s life-cycle, I don’t see much benefit from continuing to develop it. For those who patiently waited for many bug fixes and feature enhancements, I apologize. Regular readers of this space know why I had to drop the project at the beginning of the year, and the unfortunate side-effect culminates with this announcement.
All is not for naught, however, as I intend to start very soon on the CRM 2011 Grid Editor update. In light of the experience I’ve had with implementers of the CRM 4 version, I’ve come to a few design decisions about the update that will impact the product overall:
- I will no longer “hack” the CRM Grid control in an unsupported fashion.
- I will no longer reuse CRM input controls in an unsupported fashion.
- I will provide all of the feature enhancements and bug fixes that I had originally intended for the CRM 4 Grid Editor.
Understandably, these decisions will impact the total amount of time necessary to develop this project—but I may not be alone. Finally, I may actually have some help from interested contributors within the ranks of Microsoft. This kind of collaboration excites me, because it means that the turn-around for development could be much quicker and the end-result should be more uniform with the overall CRM experience.
The purpose of this announcement is to solicit comments from you about the features you would like to see from this effort, and the relative importance you might place upon them. If you’ve used the CRM 4 Grid Editor, then you’ll be in a good position to know what has already been accomplished. If not, however, I still want to hear your feedback.
So, kick me some comments below in this early, planning phase of the project so I can give appropriate consideration to the needs of the Dynamics CRM community.
What Grid (Ext.net, Telerik etc....) do you plan to Deploy?
ReplyDeleteI'll be happy to assist. Most important feature IMHO , is support of in-line edit on quote/order/invoice details grid/view (Master/details scenario's)
ReplyDeleteWill it support custom entities? Can we configure which fields in a grid are editable and which aren't? These are two features that would be great for us.
ReplyDeleteSarjan,
ReplyDeleteThe grid control itself hasn't been decided. There's some options, to be sure, but without a solid feature set, we won't really know which will be the best fit in the development timeframe target.
Shai,
Additional help would be most excellent. When external involvement can be brought into the project, we certainly will.
Cathal,
The project has always supported custom entities and will continue to do so. The same goes for the attributes one desires to allow for editing, and those which are not.
Hi Dave, I'd like to see the ability to edit any edit within a grid accessed from the home page as well as sub-grids on entity forms.
ReplyDeleteAlso the ability to change the view according to the views that are available (both system and personal views).
Support for lookup values, option sets would also be great.
Having all that would be absolutely ace!
Matt, the original utility hacked into all existing views; but for supportability sake, we'll have to implement custom grid controls that more or less mimic out-of-box grids. The drawback here is that we'll lose all interoperability with the Ribbon (since there's no sensible, documented, or supported way to interface with the Ribbon in the way we'd have to do it).
ReplyDeleteThat said, we'll try to approach a 1:1 harmony with the functionality of the views, but will likely lose many nice features that CRM 2011 offers, such as in-view filtering. That's the kind of sacrifice we'll have to make to produce a product that doesn't violate any of the supported customization guidelines.
The original supported Lookup and OptionSet fields, and I would certainly provide the same for this update. We do not see anything that would prevent us, at this point, from implementing the control both in the SiteMap (as a navigable area) or as a form control.
Any dates for release defined yet????
ReplyDeleteThere are no defined release dates; as it is, I have to manage some time with my day job to make personal time for this, and with a new infant and a daughter receiving cancer treatments, that's proving very difficult. However, I intend to start the project in earnest by the end of this month, so I'll be making progress updates in this space.
ReplyDeleteAny updates on this?
ReplyDeleteNot yet. After this post, my daughter spent a month in the ICU following a cancer treatment that aggravated a flu, and I lost a lot of ground on a major project at work, so I'm in the middle of trying to make up lost time. I appreciate your interest, and hope to reward your patience with the best tool I can provide to the community.
ReplyDeletesorry to hear about your daughter Dave. Hope she is ok now...god bless her
ReplyDelete