of the
Quick View forms are awesome, they are peekaboo utility for your records and can be used when summary information is required. There are some restrictions in place to make these forms fast and efficient.
One of the restrictions is that all formatting options for controls are taken away. As usually the case, baby was thrown out with the bathwater – it’s now impossible to set control to display multiple lines for, you know, multi-line text field. (And before you start pointing out that there are quick forms for cases and some other entities that display description fields on multiple lines: create a new quick form and try adding the description field to it. See? Those are system forms, created by CRM gods, after all).
David “CRM Baker” Crook to the rescue with some xml-twisting tip.
- Create new or edit an existing quick form.
- Add multi-line text field to the form as you normally would.
- Complete the form, publish.
- Create new solution, add the entity but select only that quick form (to keep xml shorter and things simpler).
- Export the solution as unmanaged.
- Extract customizations.xml from the zip file.
- Using your favorite xml editor, find the row and the cell elements that contain the control.
- Add rowspan attribute to the cell element.
- Add appropriate number of <row /> elements so that total number of rows is correct.
- If your <form> element has maxwidth attribute, ditch it.
- Save the file, add it to the solution zip file replacing the existing one.
- Import solution, publish.
Your XML should look like the following:
<rows>
<row>
<cell id="guid" showlabel="false" locklevel="0"
rowspan="4">
<labels>
<label description="Description"
languagecode="1033" />
</labels>
<control disabled="false" id="description"
classid="guid" uniqueid="guid"
datafieldname="description" />
</cell>
</row>
<row />
<row />
<row />
</rows>
I believe that this gymnastic is unsupported but like that ever stopped us before, right? Supported, people, supported, what Tanguy said.
Actually this is supported as per the following MSDN article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328486.aspx
Thanks for this! you can also add other xml elements such as:
celllabelposition=”Top”
In the section node which I normally use with multi line text fields because hte UI looks a bit strange with the label on the left.
full node:
In 2016 on-prem, there is one anomaly. Try it with more than one multi row text box and you hit formatting issues. The fields appear offset to each other.
I sorted that by putting each field in its own section..
There is one outstanding issue though. Despite there only being one column the fields only fill part of the horizontal space. Oddly hiding the label and widening to 250 does provide more space…
Suspect this may need some extra XML and if I work it out will let you know.
@Andrew
I faced the same problem, e.g. the field only fills only part of the horizontal space (roughly 60%).
How did you manage to widen to 250 pixels?
Thanks!
@ Andrew
Did you allready worked out the XML and can you please share it? Within our project we are facing the same problem right now.
I overcome this by adding extra rows to account for the extra ones allocated in Rowspan
so in the example where rowspan=”4″, add 3 new empty rows
….
This works! Thanks!!
Even though our customer goes a little bit to far on that one, your article helped me a ton. Thanks and keep up the good work!
This does not work with the D365 online. I’ve only tested in the unified interface. Not sure about classic. It partially works. The textarea is larger in the PowerApps form designer, but it’s still rendered small.
Follow up to my last post. It works in the Classic UI, not the new Unified interface.
it works only in classic UI and not in Unified interface. Any idea how to fix this in unified interface?
I’m also trying to fix this in the Unified Interface. Any ideas?
I’m also trying to fix this in the UCI.
BTW – I think you should be able to do this with the FormXML Manager module in XRM Toolbox – much easier than editing the customizations.xml file.
Has anyone had luck with this in the Unified Interface?
Thank you, thank you to both you and Tîpp.
Indeed you can resolve (workaround) the issue using XRM Toolbox and the FormXML Manager tool. However, in my case with PowerApps it is not the QV form that was broken but the Main Form hosting the QV form.
– Download XRM Toolbox from https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/
– Run, update and install the additional tool called FormXML Manager
– Use the connection wizard to create a connection to your CDS
– Open FormManager XML and Load Entities
– Navigate to the entity associated with the main form (not Quickview form)
– Select the Main form and select Edit FormXML
– Now the approach is pretty much the same as above:
-Find tag for your QV form
-Trace back through the XML to the tag and rowspan=”3″ – 3 is an example
-Trace forward to the it should be followed by
-Now add on subsequent lines to match the rowspan number less 1
– Click Update & Publish on FormXML editor
That should fix the issue
thank you!, it works for me in the new UCI.
@YonyM Brother could u plz share the XML piece which u edited? I added row span both to main form & Quick View form but still i dont see any increase in length of multi text field? BTW we are using UCI interface.
I can’t get it to work on UCI, I can see in the designer that the field has the extra rows added but it still shows in UCI as a single row. Is there something I am missing?
BTW FormXML editor was a great tip, much easier.
Anyone got an update on this issue in the new UI?
Thanks,
PJC
Bump. Has anyone found a solution for this issue in the new Unified Interface (UI)?