Lets say you want to provide a direct link into CRM (4.0) that opens it up to a particular Area / Section / Entity. Microsoft provides documentation on opening specific Views and Forms, but as far as the internet is concerned, loader.aspx accepts no parameters.

Well, this isn’t entirely true :). Digging through some of the CRM internals, I was able to determine that loader.aspx accepts two parameters: “page” and “area”. The meanings of these fields are a bit reversed. “page” refers to the sitemap Area Id (“Workplace”, “SFA”, “MA”, “CS”, “Settings”, “ResourceCenter” are out of the box). “area” refers to the subAreaId – probably the easiest wat to find this is using Internet Explorer dev tools.

I should note that this is unsupported: you cannot expect it to work past any patches.

For example, if you wanted to provide a link that opened CRM to the Workplace section -> Accounts, you would using the following url:

http://<server>/<organization>/loader.aspx?page=Workplace&area=nav_accts

It also works with custom entities – generally the area for custom entities is simply the logical name.

So there you have it – hope this helps somebody!