I read a good blog entry by Gareth Tucker about Dialog gotchas. Dialogs are a fantastic addition to CRM 2011 and a really powerful way to interact with the user, get values and respond.
There is a couple of quirks with Dialogs
Dialogs – You can’t save dates or bits
I have written a blog post – Dialogs can’t store dates, which basically tells you can’t stores Dates, bits or lookups. I do love dialogs and they are a great improvement it just seems the functionality needs a bit of polishing.
if you want to learn about CRM 2011 – dialogs, here are some links
there is also a couple of good dialog entries here Dialogs Part 1 and Dialogs Part 2
Gareth has also written a good blog entry on Dialogs here
anyway here are the gotchas from Gareth’s blog entry
- If your Dialog has branching logic make sure you don’t use the Responses from those branches in any later actions after the branching as those Response values will not be available in those scenarios when the user branches the other way, and CRM doesn’t like that. To get around this make use of Variables within your Dialog. Initialise a Variable at the start of your Dialog, update it within your branch and then you can happily refer to the Variable later in the script.
- Beware of placing actions such as creating records and sending emails in amongst Pages of your Dialog, they’re better placed at the end of your script firing only after the user has clicked Finish in the Dialog. Reason for this is the Dialog UI happily allows users to navigate backwards and forwards within the Dialog. If you have a record creating firing between pages 4 and 5 of your script that record creation will happen not only the first time the user progresses to page 5 but if they hit previous, go back to page 4 and then progress on to page 5 again then yeap you guessed it you will get another record created
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