When we initially created the Web Leads client I disabled the group builder since I realized it would be too costly to implement from the ground up.

However, in the more recent versions of the Saleslogix web, the group builder is implemented as an ASP.NET page and it is possible to leverage it for custom entities.

There are a few pitfalls:

1. Obviously, topnav has to be modified to enable the new group mode. Good old javascript hacking, nothing mystic going on there. It is pretty dirty code but still doable.
2. QueryBuilderMain.aspx (actually, its code-behind class) contains a big switch statement to determine the table name from the group mode. Obviously the custom entity is not part of it. To resolve this I pulled Reflector and edited the aspx file to override the code-behind methods. Because most of them were private I ended up pasting most of the code from Reflector into the server-side script. Pretty ugly stuff, and I didn’t waste any time cleaning it up, but it does run. The only actual change I had to do was add my case to the switch statement. I guess I can’t post attachments to this blog so I won’t
3. The last problem is the GroupTranslator.dll that comes with Saleslogix 7.0 does not support saving custom entity group. I guess they based it off some old version of the client or something… when you try saving a group it just saves a corrupt version of it. I found out that by simply replacing the DLL with the one that comes with SLX 7.2 it works! NOW I am kind of glad that they did not redo the translator for 7.2!

Presto – Lead group builder!