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How To Save Time When You Customize Method CRM

Over the years I’ve seen my fair share of Method customizations and have really enjoyed getting my hands dirty with some projects. I won’t bore you with all the details except to say it’s easy to lose yourself in this Method Wonderland. To help avoid this, I use every possible trick I know to keep me on the right path and in the clear.  And now I’m passing some of that wisdom on to you!

Meet my new BFF Call Another Action Set. It’s a Method action that basically refers to another group of actions living in another area of Method just waiting to be re-used. I’ll always take a little extra time with action sets if I think I can reuse the work in another area! The best part, it’s not that difficult.

Consider a simple screen that performs BMI (Body Mass Index) calculations by clicking buttons like Calculate, Calculate & Save, and Calculate & Email.

When designing the screen, most of us would initially add actions to the Calculate button and manually add the same actions to each of the other buttons.

Sure, that works, but the clever designers would realize they could ‘copy’ these calculations from one button to the other buttons.  That sounds better…right?

Consider what happens when you need to make a tiny, relatively insignificant adjustment to the calculations. That adjustment then needs to be made in a LOT of other buttons, and doesn’t look so tiny and insignificant now that you’re wasting time!

A true Method Geek would realize some of that functionality (the calculations) could be called upon from one single location when needed and ultimately save a lot of time and overhead.

If you find a function that you can call and repurpose, you reduce the amount of actions used and the time it takes to initially design and test your work.  Reducing the number of custom actions also reduces the time needed to upgrade or make changes to your workflow when the time comes to do that. Let’s not forget this also keeps things clean and easy to understand in design.  I mean, nobody wants to jump behind another designer’s mess where they’ve created 3 monster routines that do the same thing 3 times over.

We now have one central button with actions to perform our BMI calculations allowing us to keep things simple. To learn more about this and other tips or to ask questions, feel free to post on our community forums. We’re more than happy to help.

Cheers.

Val

Comments

 

LaCrews said:

Val,  Great Blog post!

You could even extend your example to more scenarios by adding a hidden textbox to the screen and using the textbox as a variable container to pass values into and out of your function.  Wow!  We could even call this a method.

August 2, 2013 9:28 AM
 

Method_Valbon said:

Mark,

You're absolutely right, we can take this a few steps further. Who knows, maybe this is the first part with more examples to come. Thanks for the comments!

August 2, 2013 10:46 AM

About Method_Valbon

A proud member of the Method team, Valbon has been very active in learning the particulars of Method. He has been involved with a number of contributions during his time including assistance in managing the Method Solution Provider (MSP) program, app building, customization jobs, preparing Method documentation, webinars and more. As a young and aspiring individual with an education in Information Technology Management complementing his tech-savvy personality, Valbon is eager to provide you with the insight you need to meet your business goals and challenges. Valbon joined the Method Integration team as a Business Systems Consultant.

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