I am using On-Premise crm dynamics 2011 and I am facing problem in the following situation. The requirement in one of the modules I am developing is to get an input from the end user and use it to filter the contacts in crm and display it to the user. I was doing this by using asp.net and crm sdk and I was retrieving the entity collection filtered by the user input and displaying the resultant contacts in a web page (custom aspx page outside crm). However, now the requirement is to display the contacts list within crm itself. Not in my asp.net application.
I was actually doing a similar thing of displaying a contact, by using the filter and fetching the guid of the contact and using the url
(http://server/organization/sfa/conts/edit.aspx?id=12b3bd97-57f8-e211-b4fd-000c29ea65f3).
This is fine with displaying a single contact. I was displaying all the contacts using the url
(http://server/organization/main.aspx?etc=2&etn=contact&extraqs=%3fpagemode%3diframe%26sitemappath%3dWorkplace%257cCustomers%257cnav_conts&pagetype=entitylist&viewid=%7b00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001004%7d&viewtype=1039).
Now the question is how can I open a similar form that displays only filtered contacts? Is there an in built form to fulfill my requirement? if not what I should do. I thought of creating a custom page and embedding in crm, however is it advisable in practical situations? I have this doubt because I would be installing this customization to the client servers. Therefore there is a chance that they might not allow third party customizations. I was wondering if there was any other way to do it.
An example is, when a customer calls, I use his phone number as a filter to lookup for a contact in crm and if there are many contacts associated with the number I need to display them all to the user.
