We recently ran into a customer requirement for the ability to schedule weekly recurring service activities in Dynamics CRM 4.0. We realized that this new functionality could be quite useful for companies that schedule regularly recurring activities with their customers. A range of businesses from physical therapy to facility maintenance might be able to take advantage of such a feature.

The solution that we delivered used JavaScript built into the Service Activity entity form, that will determine if a given Service Activity is to be repeated and for how long. It will then call web services to create the resulting Activities. For those interested, here are the steps required to implement this feature.

Create Custom Attributes
Two customer attributes were created to determine if a Service Activity should be repeated and for how long:

• new_recurringactivity – bit attribute type
• new_recurringenddate – datetime attribute type

We then added these two fields to the Service Activity form as shown.

Add Form-based JavaScript
Next two pieces of JavaScript were created and loaded onto the Service Activity form.

The first, which is triggered off the OnSave event, checks to see if the current activity has been marked as recurring and also saves the end date of the recurring services. The script then calls the CRM web service to create multiple Activities with the same parameters as the original.

The second piece of JavaScript, that runs OnLoad, checks to see if the Service Activity is already part of a recurring series, and if so, disables the recurring detail controls.

Anyone interested in the actual JavaScript code can download the file from this link.