Entity Image in CRM 2013 OR Image Attribute of Entities in CRM 2013 OR How to show Entity Image in CRM 2013

Version used for this post: CRM 2013 online trial

Entity Image is a good feature in CRM 2013. We could have an image on each record with this feature. 

For Instance, consider Account ( Customer ) entity. Its good to have the company logo with each Account ( Customer ) record.

Its possible to have image attribute for the custom entities as well. We will analyse it in the last part of this post.

With reference to CRM 2013 SDK,

"The following system entities have image attributes. Those marked with an asterisk are enabled by default to show them in the application."

Account *	KbArticle	Campaign
Incident	Competitor *	Connection
Contact *	Contract	TransactionCurrency
EmailServerProfile	Goal	Invoice
Lead *	Mailbox	OpportunityProduct
SalesOrder	Organization	Product *
Publisher *	Queue	Resource *
SalesLiterature	Territory	SystemUser *

(Ref: CRM 2013 SDK)

1. Firstly lets check Account entity record. When we click on the image icon on the left side of the header we get the option to choose an image ( Under 5 MB).

2. Lets have a look how could we enable the image attribute to show them in the application.

We need open the Account form and click on Form properties. This property enables the image on the form. We should remember this as it's useful when we create new entities.

3.  Another important points are the following

" For the initial release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online each entity can have only one image attribute and the logical name of that attribute is always entityimage. This property has been added to prepare for a future release in which entities may support multiple image attributes and there may be need to change which image is used as the primary image for the entity." ( Ref: CRM 2013 SDK)

4. Lets check it out by creating a new entity called Budget. Primary Image option set refers to the point that we just mentioned. Currently we could have only one image attribute per entity. So for now we can't choose anything from this option set. In future, if there are multiple image attributes provided in CRM then we could choose the primary image from this optionset.

5. Now lets create the image attribute for the Budget entity called Year Logo. Please note that the attribute name is 'enttityimage' and we can't change this. This also means that as of now this is the only image attribute we could have for this entity. As you all know we cant create multiple attributes with the same name.

6. Next step is to have this image on the form. Lets go to the Form design of Budget entity. Please note that the image entity is not available in the fields list.

7. As mentioned earlier, to enable the image on the form, we need to open the Form properties and tick the option Show image in the form. And say okay press okay. As per our usual practice we need to save the form and publish the form.

8.  Now lets check the budget entity record. We could select the Year logo image as shown below.