Unlocking business information is a hot topic these days. Plenty of organizations have come to the conclusion that a lot of the information that is stored in line-of-business systems such as Microsoft CRM, SAP, mainframes and others, is basically not generally obtainable by the information workers. And yet, allowing them to easily find and act on that information would give them a real boost in their productivity; all to the benefit of the company. Historicallyin the past, IT department often supported these users in their quest for information by generating point-to-point applications; solutions that communicated directly with the native application programming interfaces of the line-of-business systems. The introduction of Web Services and the whole wave of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) emphasized that this was not the best approach. The power is to the middle-tier layers and the Business Information Catalog that is part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an excellent choice if your objective is to expose the business information in to the SharePoint user experience in a loosely-coupled way. This editorial demonstrates the power of the support you have in MOSS 2007 for accomplishing this. It illustrates perfectly how SharePoint should be approached: as a development platform for delivering server-side solutions for the information workers within your company.
In this tutorial learn how to create a SharePoint custom field type that allows users to select an existing CRM database. A download link for the C # source code is available at the end of the article. SharePoint out of the box offers a variety of field types that can be used in lists, site columns and content types. These are the types of field as text, number, choice, search, users and even business data. In addition to these standard field types, you can develop your own custom field type. The main function of a field type is the storage of information. But there are cases where you want the field type to do something else, such as data validation or business rule application. Can also provide a custom field type with a more complex user interface.
What is a custom field type?
A custom field type is composed of many parts. The midfield is the kind of custom field type. If the custom field needs to store data in a more complex than for example a string or number, this class will contain a reference to a class of security on the ground. If the custom field offers a custom, then this class will also contain a reference to a kind of control on the ground. In this kind of field control can be chosen to create the controls dynamically in the code or refer to a RenderTemplate defined in a user control.
When your custom field is grounds can be compiled into an assembly. SharePoint for reporting the existence of the custom control and its structure has to create a field definition file to be sent to the
C: \ Program Files \ Common Files \ Microsoft Shared \ Web Server Extensions \ 12 \ TEMPLATE \ XML SharePoint directory. This file contains the definition of trademark CAML contains a reference to the assembly and class field type.
When you start SharePoint - after a boot server or a IISRESET - all field type definitions are loaded and users can use your custom field to a column in a list or as a site column.
As SharePoint is all about features, how best to deploy the custom fields are working with a property.
Why a CRM custom field type?
The custom field that we develop in this tutorial will give the user the ability to retrieve information about the accounts stored in the CRM database. As we hope to have a lot of accounts in the database, the user must complete a part of the name of the company. After you click the Search button, all accounts containing the specified portion in its company name will be retrieved and included in a list.
Select the account of CRM
The user can then select an account from the dropdown list, which triggers the custom field to display the details of the address of the selected account.
