APFW plugins and UI Events

[FHermez]

Been trying to put together an APFW plugin, currently working with APFW 12.1.169.0  , Managed to get a Tab to display and my code seems to be able to access the ACT Session Manager etc.

My problem is that when you click through contacts within the Contact Detail view (using the forward and back navigation buttons) my tab does not seem re-load unless I switch to another tab then switch back to my plugin's tab.

So the question is: "What needs to be done to integrate my custom tab to the APFW events?"

Many thanks in advance.

[mwood]

Hello Firas,

You'll need to hook into the javascript event that refreshes the tabs, add this to your .aspx pages:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        function RefreshTabList()  
        {
            location.reload(true);
        }

[FHermez]

Hi Matthew,

Many thanks for that, the tab seems to reload now. That said it seems to be somewhat slow compared to say the "User Fields" tab , currently my test tab simply displays the current Contact's GUID on the screen and it does so by reloading the .ASPX page when the user navigates to a different contact record.

Any suggestions as to how I can improve the performance? I'm currently considering using some AJAX code to see if that can make the process faster.

Thanks again for your prompt response.

[mwood]

I wouldn't expect a performance degredation from a page that is doing nothing but displaying the contact ID.

The sample I use does just this and I haven't noticed any performance loss. Are you trying to force a refresh on the page outside the of the jscript function?

[FHermez]

**EDIT***

I found out why the performance was slow when flipping between contacts, my page contained a reference to a JQuery library online , it seems that it was reloading the JQuery code from the source everytime the page itself was getting reloaded , removing the reference to the JQuery library seems to have improved the speed considerably.

I will look into alternative ways of referencing JQuery in my plugin, Thanks again for the assistance Matthew.

***

Not at all, the plugin's page is simply getting the current Contact GUID when the Page load event is called, I went and changed the code slightly to just get the server time instead and the performance was still slow.

There are no other functions at the moment which try to force the refresh in any way, I might try and run this plugin on a different machine to see if I get the same results.

[FHermez]

Hi Matthew,

Is there any changes for APFW 2011 regarding this method of refreshing tab?

Moving up to the 2011 version, it does not seem to refresh the tab.

Thanks again.

Firas.

[mwood]

Hello Firas,

Nothing changed that I'm aware of, in fact from looking at the date on the post it was more than likely that I was using the 2011 version at the time. However there is an issue regarding tabs with names that contain spaces, this issue is unfortunately not resolved until 14. If you need more information regarding this issue contact me via PM.

[FHermez]

Thanks Matthew, removing the spaces does fix the problem.

Any chance for this fix to be a patch or go into the next service pack (if any)?

[mwood]

I can certainly request that it be included in an upcoming hotfix, however I'm not highly confident that it would be approved because there is a workaround available and as compared to the other issues being addressed the number of customers impacted by this is relatively small.

[lloyd.tagami]

Hi I have a question why does my custom tab whether it's is located to contact/companies/opportunities tab when I run it at mozzila firefox 3.5 or 3.6 the design is of my aspx is black but when I run it on Internet explorer it is perfectly fine. can someone answer this?

Thank you

Lloyd Tagami