Add descriptions to relationship view

When working with relationships, you will find out that it would be useful to add the fields "Description 1" and "Description 2" to the associated view. This means that when you're in the account detail page and you view the associated relationships, that you will not only see "Party 1", "Role 1", "Role 2" and "Party 2". The description fields are useful to store additional information, but it would be really useful if you can show this data without the need of a double click on the record.

So Ronald. How do we do this?

Usually I'd say: "go to the settings, customization, relationships, forms and views and then modify the associated view. Now there's only one small problem. There is no forms and views for the relationships entities. There are 2 entities for relationships: Customer Relationship and Opportunity Relationship. In this article I'm using only the Customer Relationship.

Well, if the link is not there, then why not create a link to that specific page? This is the solution to this problem. The link to any view modification page is:
http://localhost:5555/tools/vieweditor/viewManager.aspx?id={guid}. We only need the guid of the view which is used for the associated relationship view. We can find this id by following the next steps:

- find out the guid of any account (open an account and press CTRL+N)
- go to this url (replace the guid with your account guid):
http://localhost:5555/sfa/accts/areas.aspx?oId={60548D20-B7F5-DA11-AAE6-0003FF2689B7}&oType=1&security=4294500000&tabSet=areaRelationships
- view the source of the page
- search for "viewid"

The value of this attribute is the view guid which you should use in the url http://localhost:5555/tools/vieweditor/viewManager.aspx?id={guid}. Ofcourse you'll need to modify the port number if you have used another port.

Now you can modify the view as desired, for instance add the fields "description 1" and "description 2" to the view. After saving the modifications, you will need to publish the entity "Customer Relationship". And you're done!

Update September 4th 2007:
The article describes how to do this for the customerrelationship. If you need to do this for the opportunity relationship, then follow this url:
http://localhost:5555/sfa/opps/areas.aspx?oId={60548D20-B7F5-DA11-AAE6-0003FF2689B7}&oType=3&security=852407&tabSet=areaRelationship