CRM 2011: Get the Right Server URL in Your CRM Client Script

If you have worked with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 long enough, you have most likely used getServerUrl function provided by the platform's API.

However, there is a problem with this function, it returns the base server URL which is the one registered in CRM deployment manager. When you work with a CRM form or web resource, you don't want to use the base server URL directly, instead you need the local server URL that hosts the current form or web resource. For instance, if the user is using a URL which is different from what's in deployment manager, say IP address or a domain alias, the URL will cause cross-domain calls, which will fail.

For this reason, I have baked a solution today which might be able to address this issue universally for all scenarios (hopefully).

var getServerUrl = function () {
    var context, crmServerUrl;
    if (typeof GetGlobalContext != "undefined") {
        context = GetGlobalContext();
    }
    else if (typeof Xrm != "undefined") {
        context = Xrm.Page.context;
    }
    else {
        throw new Error("CRM context is not available.");
    }

    if (context.isOutlookClient() && !context.isOutlookOnline()) {
        crmServerUrl = window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.host;
    } else {
        crmServerUrl = context.getServerUrl();
        crmServerUrl = crmServerUrl.replace(/^(http|https):\/\/([_a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+)(:([0-9]{1,5}))?/, window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.host);
        crmServerUrl = crmServerUrl.replace(/\/$/, ""); // remove trailing slash if any
    }
    return crmServerUrl;
}; 

In the code snippet, I assumed that a server host name can only be made of English, numeric characters, _ (underscore), . (dot), - (dash).

If you are using Silverlight web resource, you need to translate the code to C#, which shouldn't be something difficult. [Update - Please refer to my another blog post for C# code that works for Silverlight]

Although I am bluntly positive that this could solve the problem universally, but there might be exceptional scenarios that I am not currently aware. If that's the case, please let me know by leaving a comment below, I will try to come up with something better. ;-)

Thanks for reading, hope this helps.