Use UII adapters to interact with external and web applications

Article
02/21/2017

Applies To: Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2013, Dynamics CRM 2015, Dynamics CRM 2016

You can use User Interface Integration (UII) adapters to interact with your external and web applications without having access to the application’s source code.

In This Topic

Use the UII application adapter

Use the UII web application adapter

Use the UII application adapter

External applications are executable (.exe) files that weren’t written specifically for User Interface Integration (UII). External applications have their own processes. Typically, they’re written using Win32 APIs, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), or Visual Basic 6.0. A UII application adapter (HostedApplicationAdapter) allows you to modify the behavior of the application without access to its source code.

Unified Service Desk provides you a Microsoft Visual Studio project template for creating a User Interface Integration (UII) application adapter that contains pre-wired events and methods that you should implement to create your application adapter. For information about how you can create a UII application adapter to integrate with an external application, see Walkthrough: Create a UII Application Adapter.

Use the UII web application adapter

You can host any browser-based site, webpage, or web application in Unified Service Desk. A UII web application adapter (WebApplicationAdapter) acts as an interface between the hosted web application and Unified Service Desk, allowing you to modify the behavior of the application without accessing its source code.

Unified Service Desk provides you a Microsoft Visual Studio project template for creating a UII web application adapter that contains pre-wired events and methods that you should implement to create your web application adapter. For information about how you can create a UII web application adapter to integrate with an external application, see Walkthrough: Create a UII Application Adapter.

UII action protocols

Under most conditions, User Interface Integration (UII) hosted applications aren’t modified to work with the agent desktop. Occasionally, though, application modifications are the most expedient way to handle required automations. If the situation allows, a webpage can leverage HTTP-oriented UII protocols to make calls into Application Integration Framework (AIF).In a hosted application, you can customize the webpage content by implementing additional action protocols. The following table describes the action protocols User Interface Integration (UII) provides.

Protocol	Requested URL	Description
UII	UII://<Target App>/Action?<ActionData><ActionData>	The protocol triggers a RequestAction event to the target web application.
UIICTX	UIICTX://update/Name1=Value1&Name2=Value2	The protocol adds a name-value pair to the current context and triggers a ChangeContext event.

The following is an example of a UII protocol call from an HTML page.

<HTML>
  <HEAD>
    <TITLE>Sample UII Protocol Call</TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <BODY
    <A href="UII://MyApp/MyAction?<GetFocus>true</GetFocus>">Click to execute an action</A></FONT></P>
  </BODY>
</HTML>

In the preceding example, clicking the link initiates the WebApplicationAdapter for the MyApp web application and adapter. The adapter calls the action specified User Interface Integration (UII) protocol to update the User Interface Integration (UII) context. You can replace the User Interface Integration (UII) protocol with the UIICTX protocol to execute context update action.

Use UII adapters to interact with external and web applications

In This Topic

Use the UII application adapter

Use the UII web application adapter

UII action protocols

See Also

Additional resources