Enabling Notes vs Activities for Custom Entities
This past week while working with a client an item came up regarding creating an entity without Notes enabled and then a possible bug. The bug being that when you enabled Notes and republished them they don’t appear. Well it turns out that this is not a bug. That is because Notes are different than Activities because Activities would appear in the Navigation automatically. This actually is a broad statement for a wide number of considerations with Notes. If you have ever looked at them in the SDK and the DB you would agree.
Lets walk through setting this situation up step by step.
| Create a Custom Entity but before you Save uncheck the Notes and Activities boxes – the ones highlighted below. |
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| Then Save and Publish. Your new form will have no Activities or Notes as expected. |
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| Now go back to the customizations area, check the Notes and Activities boxes, Save and re-publish. Activities and Closed Activities are automatically added to the Navigation but where are the Notes? |
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| Notes don’t get automatically added to the form.To add Notes – go to the Insert Tab, select One Column from the ribbon bar and then look at the Control area and select Notes. |
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| Now Save and Publish – It’s magic, the Notes are now on the form and ready for use. |
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Also note (pardon the pun) that adding the “Notes” control like this is the way to get the new multi-faceted collaboration pane on “Polaris” style forms (ie the one with Posts, Activities and Notes as three tabs).
You can only add this new control to the new forms, which already have this on, but this is useful if someone has accidentally removed it, and will probably be a useful thing to know about when Orion gets released later this year.
Thanks. Helped me.
I have tried adding the Notes control to a form I created for the Case entity, but the button in the ribbon is disabled. Cases are set up to be able to use Notes, but for some reason I cannot add the Notes control to the form. I tried adding a one-column tab as you showed above, but I still could not add Notes. Any suggestions?
I realized the problem: the Notes were already on the form, but it was called “Conversation Tabs.” I didn’t realize it until I went to look at an actual case. I can’t believe I was banging my head on that for so long.