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Hide A Tab based upon Account Type

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After seeing some of our top partners such as Invoke and ePartners demo this functionality, I was dying to see how they did it.  Then Simon Hutson posted on his blog a script to hide a tab based upon an account being a partner or a customer.  Well, after seeing both scripts, both where awesome, but both had their drawbacks. Simon used OnLoad and ePartners used OnChange. What are the pros and cons?

Before we start with the pro's and con's, lets go through the three options available to you. The three scripting events you can have events fire on are, OnLoad, OnChange and OnSave.

   Onload:

  • The Onload event occurs after the form has loaded; it cannot prevent the window from loading. The OnLoad event is valuable because it can apply logic about how the form should be displayed and can be used to set certain fields to read-only or business required.

OnChange:

  • The OnChange event is fired when the data in a form field has changed and focus is lost. The Microsoft CRM 3.0 application processes the OnChange event first and the data in the field is validated again following the execution of your OnChange event code.

OnSave:

  • This event does not correspond to the standard OnSave event exposed by DHTML. It is fired when a user presses the Save or Save and Close button on the form. The event is fired whether the data in the form has been modified or not.
  • Validating data is a common reason to use the OnSave event. The OnSave event can cancel the save operation before it is sent back to the server. To cancel the save operation, the script should return false as shown in the following code.

So now onto Pros and Cons... :-)

With OnLoad, when the form is loaded the conditions are evaluated and the action is carried out. So if a account goes from Prospect to Customer, the tab would not be hidden until the form is reloaded. So that would require the user to save and close the window and then open back up to get the tab to show up as hidden. So if an account never moves, then this method alone would do the job for you.

With OnChange, when you change the value the condition is evaluated and the action is carried out. Once you change somebody to a supplier that tab would only be hidden while that form was open. So if you change the value, it will hide the tab, but if you save and open the form back up, the tab is back.... So OnChange works to give the user immediate feedback.

So with a little bit of time and some help from Paul Reitmeyer from Invoke, we created two scripts that handles both scenarios. How you ask? But using both the OnLoad and OnChange Events, we can play to the strengths in each of them.

So we are going to use a new tool today. Here are the steps required to hide tabs when a account opens and the picklist changes. :-)

 
  • Run the File
  • Open Internet Explorer and right click just below the address bar and unselect Lock the Toolbars. Select the Option that says “Developer Toolbar”

  • Click the option that says Lock the Toolbars.

  

  • Close Internet Explorer

  
  • Start Microsoft CRM in Internet Explorer.
  
  • Select the Accounts Area
  • Open an Account up
  • Hit the F11 Button to bring Microsoft CRM out of application mode.
  • Click on View DOM

  • Click in the DOM Explorer (At the bottom of the screen) And under the Find Menu, select “Select Element by Click.”)
  • Now click on the Details tab.
  • You will now see this in the center of the DOM Explorer.
    • The id name is the one that you want. It is what we will use to identify the tab to hide.
  • Close the Account Screen
  

  • Now go to Settings / Customizations and select the Account Entity

  
  • Open the Form
  
  • Select Form Properties
  
  • Click on Events
  
  • Click on OnLoad
  
  • Paste the following into the area and make sure the Event Enabled box is checked

           if( window.document.forms( "crmForm" ).elements( "customertypecode" ).SelectedText == "Supplier" || window.document.forms( "crmForm" ).elements( "customertypecode" ).SelectedText == "Customer")

           {          

             crmForm.all.tab1Tab.style.display="none";     

            }
  • Click Ok and Close the Form Properties.
  
  • Click on the Relationship Type Field. Open the properties of the Relationship Type and click on Events.
  
  • Click on OnChange
  
  • Paste the following into the area and make sure the Event Enabled box is checked.

if (crmForm.all.customertypecode.SelectedText == "Customer" || crmForm.all.customertypecode.SelectedText == "Supplier")

{

    crmForm.all.tab1Tab.style.display="none";

}

 
  • Save and close the form.
  
  • Save and Close the Account Entity
  
  • Publish the Account Entity
  
  • The Details Tab will now disappear if the relationship type is either Customer or Supplier...
  

An Account with the Relationship Type of Investor

The Same Account with the Relationship Type of Customer

These scripts could use some further enhancements. (I see one little hole already... Change it from a Customer to a Prospect... The form doesn't refresh... So the script needs a little more work...) What would you like to see in some future script examples?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2006
    Can I do the following in JScript:

    When a user picks a Responsible ID in a new case have it auto-fill in the Customer name? Or am I limited to presentation JScript type actions in the onChange events?

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2006
    David,
    It depends on what you are trying to do and how you want to do it. You could probaly do what you want with JScript or Workflow. You may want to talk to one of your partner or talk with our support team.
    Thanks
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2006
    Thank you very much form your post.
    I've a question for you.
    I want to to hide a Section on specific event using onchange().
    Using DOM and looking for the id of the Section, I've this kind of result:

    {54f4ba4b-d01e-4ecc-b1a3-0533034a1d47}

    If I use this code in the onchange:

    crmForm.all.{54f4ba4b-d01e-4ecc-b1a3-0533034a1d47}.style.visibility = 'hidden';

    I've an error.
    Any idea- suggestion?
    Thank you in advance. Ale

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2006
    That is something I have not yet tackled... I figured if I could hide the fields, the section became useless... :-) I will add that to the look at list... :-)

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2006
    Thank you this is great information;
    What about if you want to also include Group rights for example:

    Customer field and specific user o group

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2006
    I am sure you could do it with some scripting client side... I personally have not done that yet... John has done something like that though here... http://blogs.msdn.com/jstraumann/archive/2006/01/09/510971.aspx

    HTH
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 06, 2006
    This took me about 2 seconds to figure out...the real question is, did the developers bake in a seamless way to hide the tabs? As an example, you can hide the "Form Assistant" by hacking the customization.xml.

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2006
    When you want choose Potential customer in Opportunity and if you press "new" button in lookup view you have an error message "there was an error with this Field's customized event"

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2007
    How would you change the code if you want the Tabs to appear or be hidden base on user role, i.e. Administrator vs all other users? Al

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2007
    To hide a section on a form, I used this: // Hide the Hidden Section document.getElementById("ownerid_d").parentNode.style.display = "none"; Use a field that is in that section to find the parentNode (the section itself), then hide it. Happy Hiding!

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2007
    How can I create a group of accounts with different names? If I creat a custom entity, will I be able to transfer an Opportunity to to this custom account?

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2007
    Ok this is frustrating. This is my third attempt to write this post and hopefully IE doesn't crash on

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2007
    if (crmForm.all.customertypecode.SelectedText == "Customer" || crmForm.all.customertypecode.SelectedText == "Supplier") {    crmForm.all.tab1Tab.style.display="none"; } else {    crmForm.all.tab1Tab.style.display=""; } That way, when you select something other than supplier or customer, it goes back to being visible.

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2007
    Why are you using window.document.forms instead of the standard crmform.all on the onload?

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2007
    works like a charm... if only CRM is magic... then we'd all be magicians

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2007
    As about hiding sections, section should be referenced as item in the collection by section id. Example: crmForm.all('{54f4ba4b-d01e-4ecc-b1a3-0533034a1d47}').style.display = 'none';

  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2008
    The post above "To hide a section on a form, I used this" is missing one more parentNode i.e. // Hide the Hidden Section document.getElementById("ownerid_d").parentNode.parentNode.style.display = "none"; Just thought I'd help those of you who were wondering why it didn't work.

  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2009
    Thanks your post was very helpful