Adding a Bing Map to your CRM HTML5 LightSwitch Application

This article is part of a series of posts from Xpert360 Development Team to address real world scenarios and problems faced when designing, creating and implementing Visual Studio LightSwitch applications. Brought to you by the original and genuine Power Tools for Visual Studio LightSwitch!

Use a Bing Map to view your CRM contacts

Utilising some existing resources you can quickly and easily create an HTML5 LightSwitch application  accessing your CRM data and displaying your contacts on a map.

1. Accessing your CRM data and creating an HTML5 Application

Follow the steps outlined in the  ‘Visual Studio Lightswitch – HTML5 Dynamics CRM Contacts Browser’  video created by Xpert360 to great a simple CRM contacts browser using the Xpert360 Dynamics CRM adapter.

CRM contact List

You will need to have downloaded the Xpert360 Lightning Data Adapter for Dynamics CRM Online and on-Premise.  You can do this from the Visual Studio Gallery. Follow the steps detailed on this page to get your license and install the extension.

Lightswitch Extensions

 

Adding the Bing map

Using the steps described in the ‘Visualizing List Data using a Map Control’ blog by Heinrich Wendel add a Bing map to a new tab in the browser screen.

CRM contacts on a Bing Map

Getting it to work with CRM data

To get the map working with your CRM data you only need to make a few simple changes to the  ShowItems function in the Browser screen code – Add the relevant references to CRM Data.

ShowItems Function changes

I also removed the popup option so clicking the pushpin on the map will open the view contact screen.

View Contact Screen

That’s it – easy.

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Try them and support your LightSwitch tooling ISVs.

Also, do participate in forums and vote on your desired AIDE features. Help us to help you by prioritising the features in the product roadmap. VS2013, check! Export/Import entities and settings, check! Do you want to shape data to exclude columns? How about a localization workbench? Optimization workbench? Update metadata in bulk? That is a flavour of a few forthcoming features and ideas, we always keep a few things secret to surprise you!

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Company information: Xpert360 Ltd, founded in 2009, is an Independent Software Vendor and Custom Solution Provider based in the United Kingdom.

“Xpert360 Lightning” and “AIDE for LightSwitch” are trademarks of Xpert360 Ltd, copyright 2012 – 2013.

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