Dynamics CRM 2013 – Client API’s to interact with Business Process Flows

While implementing Business Process flows for our customers, how I wished for if Microsoft had provided Client API’s to deal with the Business Process Stages. How easily I could have implemented some of the requirements that customers asked me regarding Business Process flows. I am sure that many of you have wished if we could control the next and previous stage movements but sadly even with 2013 SP1 release, there is no client API provided. Although Microsoft is coming up with very efficient client API to deal with business process flows, but my customers has recently upgraded to 2013 and they don’t want to shift to 2015 now.
So I decided to put all the workarounds I made during my customer implementations and put that in a jScript library so that others can just refer & use it during their development. I have published the library in codeplex. The tool is available for download at the following codeplex URL:
http://businessprocessclientapi.codeplex.com/
Till you upgrade to 2015 version, you can use it for your purpose. It does whole lot of stuffs which include

• Register you own custom event handlers when Next Stage and Previous stage is clicked in the business process flow.
• Collection of all the stages in the business process flow with their following properties
  • Name of the stage
  • Is it currently the active stage
  • Is it currently the selected stage
  • The index (sequence number) of the stage
• The stage which is currently active in the business process flow
• The stage which is currently selected in the business process flow
• Active stage id
• Active process id

And whole lot of other functionalities!
Please note: This tool utilizes jQuery to achieve its functionalities. However their is no major manipulation of DOM elements done by this tool as such. So you can try it out safely for your organizations. I have tested this tool with CRM 2013 SP1 version and it works fine.
 

Hope this helps!