MS CRM 4 - Hiding System (Public) Views

In CRM 3 when we want to hide a System view, we were use to hide it by sharing that view with a team which has no users.

But in CRM 4 Microsoft has removed this functionality of sharing views (Brilliant isn’t it). This leaves us no option to hide unwanted System views using CRM Customization. What is more painful is there is no way we can delete these system views either.

But as always there are two workarounds we will achieve this goal. Out of those two easiest and quickest one is updating the SavedQuerybase table in the MSCRM database. Even though it is not recommended by Microsoft this would be very beneficial when you are in a tight schedule. Now let’s see how we can do this.

First you need to find the particular view which you want to edit from the SavedQuerybase table. For that you can use the following query by changing the "systemviewname" to the particular view name you want to edit.

select * From SavedQuerybase where name like '%systemviewname%'

Then you must update the "isprivate" flag in this table to 1. The default is 0 which means the view is public. For the update you can use the following query. The 'systemviewname' must be changed to the exact name of your view which you could find using the earlier query’s result set (column name is “name”).

update SavedQuerybase
set isprivate = 1
where name = 'systemviewname'

This will remove that particular system view from user’s dropdown list.

Anyway there is another way of achieving this in a proper way by writing a CRM plug-in to change the SavedQuery entity. This needs some coding and of course deployment. Here are two great articles which will walk you through the process;

http://msdynamicscrm-e.blogspot.com/2008/02/hiding-view-in-crm-40-using-plug-in.html
http://mscrmuk.blogspot.com/2008/08/hiding-system-views-in-crm-40.html

If you are interested about learning more about CRM 4 development tricks, I strongly recommend buying following books;