Blogs SharePoint

Ever since Microsoft purchased AdxStudios and replaced the product with Dynamics Portals, one of the biggest pains was the removal of SharePoint documents. The interim solution of course was available using Azure blobs with the Dynamics Labs solution which provided document uploads, but using the Out of the Box SharePoint Documents was a miss by a lot of Portal Developers.

For the final part of the series, I am going to demonstrate and explain the portions that resides inside Dynamics CRM (or can possibly be built inside other applications). The solution includes an HTML web resource that contains a subgrid (using JQWidgets, but can be replaced with any third party jquery grid or bootstrap table). The subgrid contains a list of documents that are contained in SharePoint, and provides the functionality to upload or download additional documents.

Now that we have configured our SharePoint and Azure environments to allow us to create an API that will be called from CRM and process SharePoint requests, we will dive into the actual API.

The next part of this solution is to configure Microsoft Azure. If you do not have an Azure account, you can create a Trial account of Pay as you go account. If you are a partner or have a BizSpark subscription you get a certain amount of credits per month, which should be more than enough for the type of implementation that needs to be done using Azure.

The easiest part of this solution is to configure SharePoint. There is no custom development involved, but just the creation of the document library, the folders, custom lists and the attributes that we want to use for the solution. We will need to start with the creation of the custom lists as they will be used for the creation of the lookup attributes.

Over the past few years we have encountered multiple scenarios where the Out of the Box SharePoint Integration component, did not fulfill the requirements of our clients using Dynamics 365 and SharePoint. Some of these had to do with capturing additional attributes in SharePoint, and sharing similar data across different entities in SharePoint.

There are many times that we create a SharePoint web part in which we have to pass query string parameters to it from the main page, or possibly use an aspx page. If the web part that we create resides inside a Page Viewer Control, we are unable to use the Request.QueryString method in order to retrieve those values.

In such case, we would have to use the Request.UrlReferrer property in order to retrieve the Query String of the parent page and manipulate the data using a Custom "Get Query String" method that we create.