Two-Column Fields in E-Mail Preview View

Scott Sewell was asking me about something strange that he noticed about the E-mail entity preview in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.  If you don't know the entity preview form appears in views when you click the Preview button  displayed in each row. The entity preview shows additional record details without opening the record for editing. The entity preview fields and layout can be customized just like any other view.

The strange behavior that we noticed was that when you add a field to the E-mail preview, CRM does not allow you to format it to span two columns.  Most other entities allow two column fields in the preview; however, E-mail does not.

Unfortunately, this appears to be a bug.  However, there is a workaround.

1.  Add the attribute to the E-mail Preview View.

2.  Export customizations for the E-mail entity and open the XML in the editor of your choice.

3.  Search for "Preview."  You should find a line that looks something like this:

              <entity name="email" objecttypecode="4202">
            <form id="{77115700-284e-438e-ab63-276332422250}" type="preview">

4.  Below that line, you will see entries for the attributes in the entity preview.  For example, this is the

           <cell auto="false" showlabel="true" locklevel="0" rowspan="1" colspan="1" id="{dc87296a-7e3c-45f1-946a-6db5d9a7efd6}">
                            <labels>
                              <label description="Created By" languagecode="1033" />
                            </labels>
                            <control id="createdby" classid="{270BD3DB-D9AF-4782-9025-509E298DEC0A}" datafieldname="createdby" disabled="false" />
                          </cell>

4.  Change the first row to colspan="2."  If there are two <cell> entries in this section between <row> tags, put <row> </row> tags around both cells in the xml, so the cells will be two columns wide and be in separate rows. 

5.  Save your e-mail configuration XML, import to CRM and publish changes.

Your E-mail Preview will now have two-column fields

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[AJFowler]

Great post, it was very helpful, as I am customizing CRM for a call-center type organization, and viewing emails quickly is very important, the more info I can fit into the preview pane the better!

Have you had any luck overriding the 500 character limit? I have the email body in the preview form and it has a large character length. It seems CRM puts an automatic maxchar at 500, and then appends "..." on a preview. They don't just do it on email, they do it on all entity's preview forms.

I looked at the css to see if I can modify the spacing, but even so, there is no way that the character limit and "..." are being done through stylesheets.

I'm thinking it's a attribute in one of the xml customizations but I just can't seem to find it.

Would you have any ideas?