Introduction:
Most applications including Dynamics CRM supports reporting and with the reporting tool in our case being SSRS it supports the options to either Print the report or save the report to a file format like PDF or Word or Excel. Depending on the kind of the report it may be often be required to save the file in a non-editable format like PDF.
Need:
A very common example of where this can be used in Dynamics CRM is when you create Quotes in CRM and need to send out Quotes to customers for approval. You can either do this through the traditional Mail Merge Option that has been available all through or with the latest option of Word/Excel Templates. But in both these cases you are presented with either excel or word file that is editable. To get this out to the customer involves more than a couple of clicks.
Solution:
Click2Export has been designed to ease up the process of sending out files through a single click. Through a single click you can export any Dynamics CRM Report (Fetchxml or SQL based) and have it attached to an email ready to be reviewed and sent out by you.
One of the common issues with automation is the lack of option to personalize the way the file is named. You might want the exported Quote file to be named <quotenumber> – <customer name> – <quote date>. Click2Export understands the need for such personalization.
In this article we explain the steps to configure the quote report to be exported with the filename suggested above.
To include field value, user has to use CRM attribute Logical Name. Logical name must be enclosed within “{” and “}”.
Example: Here we are trying to export Dynamics CRM report to PDF. To have the file named as <quotenumber> – <customer name> – <quote date>, the report template record will have the export file name specified as shown in the screenshot below.
When the Quote report is exported for the following Quote.
The email would show up as
Exported file name will be as below.
In case field does not exist, Solution will remove the parameter from the file name.
Note: Custom attributes are also supported for this feature.
Below data types are supported for file name.
- Lookup.
- Date Time
- String
- Option Set
- Two options
- Money
- Decimal
- Numeric
Conclusion
Click2Export for Dynamics CRM is one of the must have productivity solution to improve the efficiency of the users by reducing the clicks required to do one of the most common tasks. Apart from sending out the exported file as an attachment through an email, it also supports simply exporting the file and attaching to the notes section of the primary record for future reference. Learn more about Click2Export here