Example of CCA Hosted Web Application with Bing Search

Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) introduced for Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2011 is built using robust Microsoft User Interface Integration (UII) framework and CCA is the collection of hosted applications (CRM, Case, My Dashboard, Dialer, CTI, Notepad…  ), which work together to provide desired functionality.

So we shall start with simple example application to see how powerful UII framework is.

Requirement

Add a another workflow step “Bing Search” in between existing workflow steps and when user was unable to find CRM knowledge base items, which are related to selected case to resolve case, then user should be able to do Bing Search on internet using case title.

Integration Points:

When user clicks Bing Search, CCA should automatically pick the CRM case title and trigger the Bing Search by case title as below.

Implementation

What a powerful robust UII framework, we can implement above requirement with no any custom code, but just with some configuration entiries.

Create Hosted Web Application

·         First we must create Hosted Web Application using UII Web Application project template and it will ask URL of the hosted web application.

·         Then we must inspect the web application to identify the controls, which we will deal with, using UII inspector. It generates binding, as showing in below screens, required to identify the controls. Ones you pressed the add control button on UII inspector, it will copy the binding into UII web application project.

      Note:You should edit control name, which was auto generated by Inspector, with meaningful unique name. 

·         Create workflow activity to find the case title and do the Bing Search based on title.

Microsoft.Uii.HostedApplicationToolkit.Activity provides pre-defined set of work flow activities to deal with hosed applications within CCA and following sections describe what each activity does in workflow.

Get Control Value

Get the case title from the “CRM Case” hosted web application and assign it to CaseTitle output variable.

Control Finder

Find the control “Search Text”, which will be identified by binding that was generated by inspector, at Bing Search hosted web application.

 

Set Control Value

Set Search Text as CaseTitle, which was initialized at get control value section.

Execute Control Action

This will trigger default action of search button at “Bing Search” hosted web application.

·         Configure Action.

This allows you to configure action detail on Bing Search web application, which will be deployed at CRM 2011,  using workflow we just completed.

Browse work flow we just completed.

·         Deploy web application as a hosted web application on CRM 2011.

This will deploy all configuration entries required to run the application on CCA with CRM 2011. Clicking Deploy on context menu shows the logging window to log into CRM 2011 and it will allow you to deploy hosted web application “Bing Search”.

·         Add “Bing Search” into workflow steps in CCA.

In order to add Bing Search into workflow steps at above location at CCA, you must add below two configuration entries at UII section in CRM setting area.

Then you are good to go. Have fun! We haven’t done any single line of code to do this example.