One of the greatest advantages of the Dynamics 365 suite is its web-based frontend. Users do not need a fat client installed on their machines to access the platform; a web browser is enough to access it. Most end users consider frontend user experience paramount to their day-to-day job. Dynamics 365 Sales offers a wide range of configurable extensions to enhance frontend user experience. In the previous chapter, we covered some no-code extensions; however, sometimes, customer requirements go beyond what Dynamics 365 offers out of the box. This is where JavaScript comes into the picture. JavaScript is currently the most popular web frontend scripting language. It is widely used in the industry and, thus, makes it easy for developers to pick up and start using.

Most online resources and training materials you find typically cover the bare minimum to achieve your extensions. Very few actually give you...

In this first recipe, we will set up our environment and write a simple JavaScript method that automates generation of a date field with today's date when another field is populated, using the custom Graduation Details entity created in the previous chapter. Ensure the entity has a form with the Supervisor and the Post Graduate Start Date attributes to apply our customization on it. Even though we are using the entity from the first chapter, the customization can be applied to any lookup and date field of your choice.

In addition to the usual access to Dynamics 365, the correct security role (System Customizer or higher), and a solution to contain your customization, it is highly recommended that developers...

In the previous recipe, we wrote our first JavaScript function and wired it manually. If you are going down the custom development path, always keep in mind future maintenance tasks. Rather than wiring your events manually through the user interface, consider doing it programmatically. Not only will that reduce the manual steps to configure your extensions, but it will also give you one location to view/maintain all the event wiring.

In order to wire your event programmatically, you'll need a candidate function to wire (we will use the function from the previous recipe), an IDE to write your code, and, of course, access to a Dynamics 365 instance with the System Customizer or higher security role.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!

Whenever you see yourself copying and pasting code more than once, consider refactoring your code into reusable functions. In the first two recipes of this chapter, we built single-purpose functions with hardcoded values. We can refactor our code into a collection of reusable functions.

In this recipe, we will refactor our two functions into generic ones by parameterizing them.

As per the previous recipe, you will need an IDE and access to a Dynamics 365 instance with the System Customizer or higher security role.

As the Dynamics platforms evolved over the years, new features were introduced to keep the platforms modern and up to date. In older versions, the only way to communicate with Dynamics CRM programmatically was through SOAP web services. In later years, the Microsoft Dynamics product team introduced OData endpoints that greatly simplified and modernized the communication mechanism.

In this recipe, we will retrieve the list of activities associated with a contact, and then display a warning message if any of the activities are open and assigned to the current logged-in user.

To perform the customization, you will require access to a Dynamics 365 module along with a System Customizer or higher role. An...