DataVerse Side Panes

One of the 2021 wave 2 new features which looks interesting:

First, the MS doc page is pretty good. In essence there is piece of JavaScript like this which needs to be triggered in some way, picking up on the relevant entityid from the underlying page.

Xrm.App.sidePanes.createPane({
title: “My Pane Title”,
canClose: true,
width: 600
}).then((pane) => {
pane.navigate({
pageType: “entityrecord”,
entityName: “email”,
entityId: “7d8f9502-040f-ec11-b6e6-000d3ad677f2”
})
});

I recommend letting the user close the pane (canClose=true), as it functions like a browser tab and can end up far away from the original page, and best to close the pane when the user navigates away.

Multiple side panes can be loaded this way. Is this better than embedding forms in forms? I am tending to think not for a lot of use cases – creating a very specific form which can be embedded in another is generally more what users want.