Using Hyperlinks in Dynamics CRM 4

Hyperlinks come up in a lot of different contexts: included in emails, text links on a web page, and clickable graphics are just a few of the more common. In Dynamics CRM you can take advantage of them too, although sometimes it might not be so obvious how to do it.

I’ll give you two examples of how to use them here; there are plenty of others but these are the two methods I find myself and my customers using the most:

1. Add a hyperlink field to an entity’s form. If you look at the out-of-the-box Account form in Dynamics CRM you’ll notice a “web site” field. If you enter a URL in that field, a user can double-click on it to navigate to the site. A number of entities in CRM have this built in (Account, Contact and Competitor for example), but if you want to add a clickable URL field to a customizable entity or one of your own custom entities, it’s easy enough to do, following these steps:

a. Customize the entity in question (Click Settings, Customization, then Customize Entities. Locate the entity in the list and double-click it.)

b. Click Attributes, then click New. You should see a dialog titled “Attribute: New for <entity>”, where <entity> is whatever you’re customizing.

c. Name the new attribute and give it a Type of “nvarchar”, then select “URL” for the Format:

d. Save and close, then be sure to add the new attribute to the form for the entity, and publish the customizations. In the example I show here, I’ve added a clickable link to the form for a custom entity I use to keep track of Events. I called it “landing page”, and you can get an idea about how it works by looking at this screenshot:

The way it’s implemented in Dynamics CRM, you actually have to double-click to navigate, so it behaves slightly differently than most hyperlinks, but in my experience users don’t complain too much about that.

2. Insert a hyperlink in an email template. This one is pretty well hidden, and it took me a while to realize it was even there! Suppose I’m creating an email template and I want to include a clickable hyperlink in it. In the following screenshot I’ve select the text for my company’s name and I want to insert a clickable link to our web site:

Unless I’m missing it somewhere, there’s no menu command to let you do this! However, if you remember the keyboard shortcut you might often use in Outlook for the same thing – ctrl-k – and try it in this context, you’ll see that it works. Simply enter the URL you want a click on the text to navigate to, and you’re done:

When I do this, however, I find that I still have to select the text afterwards and change its color to indicate to the reader it’s a link, since inserting the hyperlink doesn’t change its formatting in any way! There might be a default setting I could change, but so far I haven’t seen it – if you know how to fix that, please let me know!