How to Change Icons of a custom Entity in MS Dynamics CRM 2011

How to Change Icons of a custom Entity in MS Dynamics CRM 2011

MS Dynamics CRM 2011 provides a very cool feature to change the icons of a custom entity. This method is very simple and no coding required for this. Webresources utility plays a major role for the same.
So we are going to create a new entity and let's see how this feature works.
Lets kick off by creating a custom entity called 'AP'

Once its created, we could go solutions and choose the our newly created entity. At the top you could see a button called Udate Icons.

Note:There 3 types of Icons to be assigned (Each of them not more than 10KB)
1. 16x16 pixels --This Icon will be placed in Web Application
2. 32x32 pixels --This Icon will be placed as the shortcut icon in the MS Office Outlook
and finally
3. 66x48 Pixels --This Icon will be placed on the entity form

The key advantage of MS Dynamics CRM 2011 is that it provides us the webresouce utility to store all these Icons. So first we need to store all these Icons in the webresource so that we could refer them later. Its ideal to name each icon with some identifier. For instance to identify 16x16 pixels we could name it as myicon16.png. This will provide more readability. However this is not mandatory but just a suggestion.

So all the three icons could be uploaded in the same way.

Now lets navigate to the entity and choose the update icons option.

Click on the lookup to choose the file from webresource

Once all the Icons are selected click OK and publish the entity and see the magic.

We don't need to edit the sitemap and also its very easy to do. But remember System entities doesn't have this option.