Where do I start? (Custom entities and forms and images)

[bnoji]

I've been asked to configure and customize CRM 3.0 to handle a few specific things:

1. Maintain a list of vendors
2. Maintain a list of general products (i.e. Brass Door Handle)
3. Maintain a list of the specific "version" of the general product that each vendor makes, and link these to the general product and vendor records. Each record will have an image associated with it and the specific price that vendor is offering it at.

The idea is that when a customer asks for a specific product, we are able to build a list of what vendors produce that specific product, how much they are offering it for and an image of each one. They have asked for a new form, similar to a quote where a "General Product" is selected and this filters to a list of the specific versions from each vendor which can be added to a "comparison sheet" to be sent to the client.

I'm not sure where to start on this. I assume this can be done using price lists and the regular product catalog, but I wasn't sure on the limitations of relationships with the customizable entities...and I didn't know if I could get the same integration as the product catalog by creating custom entities.

Thanks.

 

[jodonnell]

Without learning more about your business its hard ot recommend which way to go but you definately need to check out custom entities as they would allow you to build up your own custom product catalog complete with images etc (using code).

I assume you have created a test system to experiment with. Take a look through the online help as it covers custom entities and see if it makes sense

John O'Donnell
Microsoft CRM MVP

http://www.crowechizek.com/microsoft

====================================
John O'Donnell
Microsoft CRM MVP

http://www.crowechizek.com/microsoft

 

[bnoji]

First, thanks for the reply. Our company assists small/medium businesses in product development and manufacturing as well as import and customs services. Many of our clients are small companies that would like a priavate labeled product.

We usually break down a project into sub-projects by the major tasks or products, for example:

Project: Space Boots
- Sub-Project: Space Boot Shells
- Sub-Project: Space Boot Jets
- Sub-Project: Space Boot Packaging

Often there are several Factories that produce the item we are looking for with slight differences in design or price. We currently build a spreadsheet with an image, price and specs and present it to the client to choose from. I'd like to store a table of "Products", "Product Offerings" and "Factories". Products are the general products/descriptions and Factories are actually just Account records classified as type "Factory". Each "Product Offering" links 1 factory with 1 product and stores the price, specs and image. (I think I have it working, see below.)

Well, I started by creating new "Product" (custom and not associated with the product catalog) and "Product Offering" entities. The products are linked to the various offerings by a 1-to-many relationship with the Name field mapped so that each offering keeps the same name as the "Product".

Issue 1: These "Product Offerings" should also have a many-to-1 relationship with a Factory (or one to many from Factory to Product Offering). I'd like to continue to use the Accounts/Contacts to manage production faclilities we work with and mark all as type Vendor or Supplier. My issue is that it would not let me create a parental relationship with the Account entity because it already has one assigned for Contacts. How can I make this intermediate table work?

Issue 2: I need to be able to display an image within the main form of each Product Offering. From what I've read I can programatically access URLs in an iFrame... Is there a suggested way to store these files? I'd like CRM to also manage uploading and storing of images for each product, place them in a web server directory where we can access them via URL.

 

[jodonnell]

Wonder if sharepoint would be a good repositoru for these images? As you can also code against sharepoint you could write an app to upload images. You could then reference these images via a url in a CRM iframe

John O'Donnell, Microsoft CRM MVP, MCSE, MCSA
Microsoft Business Solution Certified Master – Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC

http://www.crowechizek.com/microsoft

 

[bnoji]

Any suggestion on how to get started doing this? At this point I have all the entities and relationships working, my issues are now storing images and displaying them in a tab on the record form.

 

[jymm]

wow - sounds like you have come a long way... We actually thought the custom entities were not that difficult once we made a few mistakes...

did you decide to do this in CRM or in Sharepoint?

In CRM all we had to do was go into the custom entity and select Actions->Publish. The next time that a remote user went online & offline (still HATE that term) CRM synced the new form to their local DB and they were off and running. We still would like our customer entity to roll up to the Contact AND Account we associated them with (or even the parent account since we go at least 3 deep), but the way things are set up, that is not to be.

 

[bnoji]

I've been playing around with a few options and I've decided to create a new web site in IIS running on port 5556. We're going to create a new SQL table in the CRM database to store image filenames and their associated entitie's unique ID. An ASP page will display all images for that product referenced from an iFrame in CRM. The same ASP page will accept uploads for new images and allow you to delete existing images.