We recently were part of a project that needed Mobile Offline capabilities of Dynamics 365 for Sales. While it was an overall pleasant experience but there were few challenges too, caused by certain limitations of the Dynamics CRM Mobile App offline mode. These included issues with views, editable grids and workflows, custom ribbon buttons and form customizations. Details of these limitations is given below:
Limitations with Views IN DYNamics 365 for sales:
Views having references to any related entity, which is not provisioned to be available offline, would not work in Dynamics CRM Offline. We also have seen that if filter criteria involve Date/Time fields, it would not work in offline mode. Such views would not show any records in offline mode. Few people reported to have issues with views, if they try to display Process Stage name in the view.
Limitations with Editable Grids IN DYNamics 365 for sales:
Editable grids a great new feature included in Dynamics 365, but they are not supported in Offline mode. It was not a big deal in our scenario so we completely turned them off for our entities. But there are ways to counter this using JavaScript. We can control the visibility of any element on the form, using the Offline API available. We can easily get client type and state (offline or online) using the JS. For example, to see what client user is using we use this piece of JavaScript:
and to get the state of the client we can use:
So, by using combinations of these above two commands, we can easily determine if user is using Mobile App with Offline capability and control the visibility of these grids.
Limitations with Form Customizations
During our testing, we found some interesting scenario where our custom JS customizations were failing. There was a field on one of our forms, whose visibility was set on the form customization, to hide not be visible by default.
But when we were making it visible using JavaScript in offline, it was not being visible and was not giving any error. When we raised the issue with MSFT, they said it to be a bug and they proposed an alternate to show/hide field using JS only. So, we had to modify and make this field hidden using JS on form load and then make it visible using JS. This work around worked for us and hopefully this will get resolved by the time this blog is published.
Other issue we faced was with custom Ribbon buttons. They were not available in offline mode.
Workflows also don’t work in offline mode, but they get processed when user goes online.
Alphabold, as Microsoft Dynamics Partner, helps different companies in solving mobile offline limitations while implementing Dynamics 365 for Sales.
If you have any question or queries, do not hesitate to reach out to us!
