Chapter 6: Entity Customization: Relationships, Custom Entities, and Site Map

Overview

In Chapters 4 and 5, you learned how to customize entities by modifying their attributes, forms, and views. However, those chapters primarily focused on customizing the entities that Microsoft CRM installs by default. Microsoft CRM also allows you to create entirely new entities to track and manage additional categories of data in your system. The new entities that you create are called custom entities. Before you start creating your own custom entities, you should understand how Microsoft CRM uses and manages entity relationships, in addition to knowing the ins and outs of customizing entity attributes, forms, and views that you just learned.

In this chapter, we'll cover all of the details related to entity relationships, including data relationships, relationship behavior, and entity mapping. When you understand entity relationships, you're ready to create custom entities. We'll walk you through the steps and configuration settings necessary to create custom entities, show you how to integrate custom entities with the default Microsoft CRM entities, and highlight some of the tricks we've learned.

Once you start creating custom entities, you will want to tweak and modify where they appear in the Microsoft CRM application navigation. The last topic in this chapter will show you how to use the Microsoft CRM site map to customize and revise the user interface to blend in your custom entities and custom Web pages.