Using Generic URLs in CRM On Demand

I found a little tidbit recently that may end up saving you some time and frustration.

If you recently had your staging environment (which is a snapshot of the production server) refreshed, then you may have noticed that your Web Applets and Web Links were broken. That is because you were using URLs targeted to a specific CRM On Demand server. To prevent this issue from occurring in the future, you should use generic URLs. Let’s look at an example to make this point more clear.

The following URL is targeted to the Account Home page on the gta server:

https://secure-ausomxgta.crmondemand.com/OnDemand/user/AccountHomePage
To make it easier to read, I underlined the server name and target page name.

The URL shown above is targeted to the gta server specifically. So, when this company’s staging environment is refreshed, this link will be broken.

Using a generic server name within your URL will prevent future issues.
The URL shown below is targeted to the Account Home page using a generic server name:
https://secure.crmondemand.com/OnDemand/user/AccountHomePage

Notice that this URL does not contain the typical ‘ausomx’ portion of the link. Generic URLs can be used for Global Web Applets, Object Web Applets, and Global and Object Web Links. However, generic URLs cannot be used for Custom Web Tabs, because they require a server-specific URL.

To use a generic URL, simply replace the target page in the following example:

https://secure.crmondemand.com/OnDemand/user/[other]