To improve user experience, reduce the time taken to locate a record within CRM users often request a simple search facility. This can be an extension of an existing view or user query.
There are system views associated with each entity but the users can create custom views.
If we use these views as our starting point, we could enhance the user experience when designing custom screens that need to display data as list in a grid. The views can be invoked via the fetchdata.aspx. This page resides on the CRM Server and if called (using POST) with the correct values can return results similar to the results often seen with CRM grid. The data posted to the form needs to contain the view id that you wish to return the data from and its corresponding fetchxml and layoutxml with any additional filter criteria that you may wish to apply.
The results that are rendered considering the effort involved are amazing! You get all the functionality of the grid ie paging, icons, stylesheet, menu bar etc.
Drop me an email and i'll show how its done - Abdul.Majid@westwoodsoftware.net