As many are aware, the Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 has been live for a bit of time now. With it come a lot of shiny brand new features for everyone to play with, of which we’ve been blogging about on our site for a bit of time now.
However, with all great new toys, there are usually some pitfalls to be aware of and avoid. And this release doesn’t fall short of that classification, as there is a potential headache that most customers and partners should be aware of and plan for.
Microsoft posted on their blog some good detail about some performance improvements that were made to form load times. This is great as I’ve heard from multiple customers (and experienced) the slow loading forms that seem to have popped up when CRM 2013 released with its new UI scheme.
As seen in the image below, the new rendering forms of Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1 drastically improve load times of forms.
From Microsoft’s blog post, you can see details of what they changed to get this improved performance. However, with those changes comes the risk of unsupported scripts now failing. Some examples of where scripts could fail are:
- DOM manipulations
- Accessing internal iFrame URLs
- Accessing unsupported APIs
- Other windows related assumptions
However, the good news is that there’s a plan in place that you should follow to resolve these issues.
- First off, make sure that you test your environment thoroughly in a sandbox instance before updating your production instance to identify any potential issues.
- If you find something that is broken, you can temporarily turn off the new form rendering by going to your System Settings, and setting the “Use legacy form rendering” option to Yes. Note: This option to use the legacy settings is most likely going away with the next major release, so please plan on fixing your broken scripts immediately to avoid issues in the near future.
- You can also download the CRM 2015 Custom Code Validation Tool from this link, and run it on your environment to identify the usage of any deprecated API’s as well as any usage of unsupported API’s.
Moral of the story, be aware, be prepared, and have a plan. You definitely don’t want to be caught by surprise in production when you’re getting random errors loading forms. Good luck!