Dynamics CRM 2011 custom code

I'm struggling to find much documentation on Dynamics CRM 2011 and have a problem. I'm not looking for code more a pointer as to the correct method of approach (workflow, dialog, custom HTML web resource etc)

I basically want something that does the following:

• Go to Contact list
• Select some contacts
• Ribbon actio开发者_如何学Pythonn opens a box that allows me to select a custom role from a drop down list (source is a dynamics entity)
• Select a radio box for either add or remove role
• Save the changes, this will add or remove a role from the contact and also send an email to that contact

I know how to get a list of selected recordIDs but I am not sure if I should be calling a dialog or a custom HTML page with JS.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

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This may not work at all for your scenario but it is worth thinking out of the box sometimes. This would only work if you have a small number of roles and the roles don't change that often.

Add checkboxes on the Contact, one for each role. Build workflows that fire on update of those checkboxes that send your emails. Now users can quickly edit lots of Contact Roles by using the Multi-Edit feature.

The benefit of this approach is it is a "no code" solution and it is very easy for the User since it uses out-of-the-box functionality. The downside is that you need to maintain those checkboxes. But it may be easier than writing a bunch of web resources and javascript!

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I have assembled a list of bookmarks on the subject here. I hope the link works.
Gareth Tucker's site is specially interesting.

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In the end the solution was to create a Ribbon item that accepted the selected Guids from the contact list.

Then read those in from a web resource (Silverlight) which called into the sdk and created / removed the records accordingly