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Building New Mobile Screens: A Round Up of Essential Articles

Hints, Tips and Tricks

Technical Hints Tips and Tricks that cover customization and development using Sage CRM. API usage and coding are covered.

Building New Mobile Screens: A Round Up of Essential Articles

Jeff Richards
1 May 2014 10:44 AM
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Sage CRM offers native iOS and Android mobile CRM apps. The apps allow you to view contacts, opportunities, notes and customer information with or without internet access. The snag is that these apps are fixed in scope and can not be extended to include new custom entities or features.

This is where the mobile optimised theme for Sage CRM becomes one of it most useful features for customers. The optimised themes allow online access to Sage CRM using just about any mobile device. The themes present a subset of Sage CRM's screens in a form suitable for the device and screen size being used to access the data. These mobile optimised screens require internet access but they can be extended to include new entities, fields and structures.

The mechanism for extending the mobile optimised themes is code-less. There are no scripts to write and it is all done by using the inbuilt system action 'RunBlock'.

RunBlock can also be used to build addition screens for the main Desktop interface. Over the last few years there have been several articles written that together build a very good pictture of how to carry out customizations using RunBlock. Below are just a selection of these.

RunBlock Fundamentals

Using RunBlock to Build New Mobile Screens (iPhone/Android and Tablet)

Note: The articles below refer to building iPhone screens but the same method is used for building screens for the Android and Tablet themes.

Comments
  • Ted O'Shea
    1 May 2014 4:53 PM

    Hi, Jeff.  Thanks  for the consolidated collection.  I've followed Aoife's article , except that my Entity was not Created by the Wizard.  Everything links together fine but when I use Find to get to MyEntitySearchBox  I have no "Find" button on the top of the screen above the fields.  If I select another similar screen I can get Cancel and Save buttons to show up but still no Search.   What is causing the Runblock to render the "Find" button or other buttons for that matter ?  I can't seem to find any correlation anywhere that influences this behavior.

  • Jeff Richards
    2 May 2014 9:09 AM

    Did you create your screen as type 'Search' and did you associate it with the list?

  • Ted O'Shea
    2 May 2014 4:45 PM

    Jeff,  Yes I did which was the bit that was puzzling.   However, after a fair amount of tinkering, I've got it all sorted out.  Mind you, I am not positive that the way I've done things aren't a bit more roundabout then they need to be but nevertheless it IS working.  I was able to piece together enough clues from your Blog Post "Creating a Codeless search Screen on an External Database using Runblock"  and Aoife's "Sage CRM for iPhone - Adding Custom Entities"  to figure things out.  Unfortunately, the assumption that one would need to do this only with a Wizard created Entity is not a great one.  Aoife's article assumes some things and leaves out some important details.  I have written up a "How to" with screen shots and will send along to you. Perhaps you can take the concept and create one of your own How To's that will undoubtedly be a much better exposition then I could hope to offer.  I look forward to seeing it right here sometime in the future.