I am customizing the contact entity (OOB) in CRM 2015. One of the attributes of this entity is Address, which is a composite attribute built using the following
Street1
City
State/Province
I like to remove the City field from the flyout alltogether.
How can I achieve this ?
Even though, currently there is no supported way to do control this (hopefully Microsoft might make this available in future release) But a little tweak did the trick for me to overcome this challenge.
I created a Business Rule ho hide the default fields (City, State and Country) from the form. I specifically wrote the Business Rule without specifying any conditions which means it will load/work all the time.
Consequently, with the effect of Business Rule the fields got hidden from the flyout menu as well. I changed the Display name of Address Composite Field to Street and made it Visible, also included the rest 3 new Lookup under same section.
Finally my requirement got fulfilled now as I was able to use the composite field to capture the 4-fields (Street1, Street2, Street3 and Zip Code) and also use the individual lookups for the City, State and Country.
Link: https://ashwaniashwin.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/update-change-address-composite-field-in-crm-2013-with-busoness-rules/
Related
Title basically sums it up.
I have an Account screen, with a sub-grid of Opportunities (by the "parentaccountid" field of Opportunity). When I click + Add New on that Opportunity grid, it autofills parentaccountid on the new record form. That's normal.
BUT I also have 5 other Lookups to Account on Opportunity, with different/specific meanings. What's weird is that it's setting ALL of those Lookups to the Account record I started at (Account record that had the Opportunity subgrid where I clicked +).
Is this expected behavior?
Anyway to change this?
I'd expect CRM to only autofill the field that defines the association for that subgrid (i.e. only auto-fill parentaccountid in this case, leave the other 5 Account lookups blank)
I never experienced this, but I believe this is due to some OOB relationship mapping according to a community thread. Read more
Try to find the mapping under N:1 relationships, and if possible remove the mappings. Otherwise you may need to use the Business rule, script or plugin to remove the auto-mapped values.
Edit:
This explanation makes sense and it is expected behavior as per product deisgn.
Since there is an out of the box parental relationship (opportunity_customer_accounts), all those additional account lookups are automatically mapped to that same "parent" (accountid field), and, since they have already been mapped automatically, you can't map them to another field
I am currently leading the implementation of Office 365 for a crowdfunding portal for a UN agency. The portal features stories of survivors of human trafficking. Their cases are generated in Dynamics (for various reasons) and published to the user-facing platform. Each case comprises of a collection of records including various text fields which contain individual story points.
The problem: Those survivor stories are usually generated by teams on the ground but can be diplomatically sensitive.
As such each case needs to go through an elaborate review process to ensure that higher ups can propose changes to the case, make comments for specific fields. Each field can have several (1:n) comments/ change suggestions from n staff (not just one).
It was proposed to collate feedback in a field called 'comments' but this separates the input from the fields the comment was made about. We are now looking for a solution that emulates Word's 'tracking changes' feature.
Options considered but ruled out:
We are aware that Dynamics comes with an audit history module, but this usually requires changes/ comments to be displayed in a separate window which defeats the purpose.
Is anyone aware of a useful workaround which accomplishes one or several of the below:
Flags changes in a particular record per record and next to said record
Allows for said changes to be accepted or rejected by the Case owner
Supports workflow integration and user hierarchies.
Works in Dynamics (not Sharepoint... ... ...)
Any advice would be highly appreciated.
While I am all for creative uses of CRM, and CRM can store the data you're looking for, using CRM as a collaborative document editing system might be pushing the envelope.
Before you build out a custom document editing system, you might want to consider reviewing SharePoint, and some of the other document management add-ons that exist for CRM. While I have not implemented it myself, I have heard good things about LaserFiche.
You might also want to look into a 3rd party editor that provides "track changes" capabilities that you can embed in a web resource on the Case form.
I took a quick look and found this LoopIndex LITE plugin for CKEditor.
If you do go the custom route, here's a potential design for capturing the comments on a field-by-field basis:
Each field could have a separate text box where a user can enter a new comment about that field. A workflow could take that comment, turn it into a new "comment" record which would include the user, timestamp, and text. The workflow would also clear the box for the next comment.
You might also want to have this text box hidden by default for each field and have a checkbox called "Add Comment" (again for each field), which would show the new comment text box.
And you could consider having the new comment text box automatically populate with the original text, so the user can edit it rather than from start from scratch. This could be optional via an "Edit original text" checkbox or button.
To get really fancy you could run a text diff module to compare the updated text and the original, and store the new text as HTML, highlighting the differences.
The approval process would work off the "comment" entity. People could review each comment and approve or deny, with additional "meta-comments".
You could then have a web resource that would compile all existing comments for the field into html and display them under the field, formatted based on their status (i.e. pending review in black, denied in red, approved in green).
While I think this approach can be effective, adding a new field to the survivor's story would have some overhead. Another approach would be to create a Story Field entity and a Story Field Type entity. Let's say there are 5 fields now in the survivor's story. When you populate a story into CRM you'd create 5 Story Field records, each with its appropriate type. And, the Story Field entity would have a 1:N to Comments. This way, adding a new field to the survivor's story template is as simple as adding a new Story Field Type.
My proposal:
Use CRM incident entity or any custom entity as now hierarchy data can be maintained.
Parent incident is field collected record & child incidents can be used for tracking each feedback / comments / change requests from officials.
Build a custom approval mechanism using actions/workflow/plugins based on your team skill set. This can be invoked based on BPF stages in child Case.
On approval (child case closures) the values / comments can be rolled up / incorporated to the parent incident record.
Note: Multiple parallel feedback for overwriting changes can be a challenge, but approval business process flow should take care of this scenario.
I have added a new entity to my Solution in Dynamics Online 2016 Update 1 which is used to log the details of a physical computer (named System). This entity needs to have an address associated which may not be the same as the linked Account and Contact records.
How do I include an address field(s) in the same way that the Account and Contact entities do, that has a multiple line input field which pops out to multiple single line fields when clicked and links to a Bing maps location beneath it?
If this is not possible (and I really hope it is) then what is best practice for associating street addresses with custom entities?
what you describe is known as the composite field and it's not possible to create custom fields with the same flyout style.
Regarding the address, you can proceed as you prefer, create the fields or create a separate entity, or what you think suit your requirements.
In Dynamics CRM 2016 (on-prem), I've custom child entity Partiesthat have a look of type order. Currently it is working properly and it is showing order name but I want it to show Order ID.
I tried to resolve by creating my own view, adding order id field only and making it default view for the look up but it don't meet my requirements.
This is controlled by the lookup view for Orders. The first three fields in the lookup view are shown when selecting records from the lookup field.
You cannot change the position of (or remove) the Name field from the lookup view. That still leaves you with two additional fields to be shown, one of which could be the Order ID.
I know no supported ways around this (except creating a workflow to copy the Order ID to the Name field and adding a custom name field instead, if you really insist).
Changing what appears on the form after you make a selection in a lookup field is not possible, unfortunately. The primary attribute is always what gets displayed after a user specifies a lookup value (which, for the Order entity, is the Name attribute). As Henrik's answer mentions, people commonly get around this by copying the value they want to see into the primary attribute using a workflow or a plugin.
I have a business requirement that execs are really wanting to see. In our lead and email templates we have a few of our products listed. The products themselves are pretty stable but the prices are of course subject to change.
I'm OK with hard coding the product name into email but I was hoping the price could be a slug that get's resolved.
We only have one price list so nothing to worry about there.
I see no way to get access to the product and or price list entities through the data field values dialog.
So my thought was to create the 2-4 fields in the lead and opportunity entities. Then create a background workflow that takes the price from the price list and sets those fields.
Then when an email is generated I can access those hidden fields as they will be available through the lead or opportunity entity.
Any thoughts, concerns, better approaches?
Unfortunately CRM's email template system is not capable of what you describe out of the box. As you have discovered it will only permit you to insert placeholders from, or assocated with, the primary entity. It won't let you insert fields from other entities. What you suggest as a workaround is possible but it's not an ideal solution as you'll have these 2-4 redundant fields on each record type that contain duplicated data from the price list.
If you have any experience with creating custom workflow activities using the SDK then the best solution here is to create a custom activity that accepts either an draft Email or Email template as a input parameter, instantiates the email if required, loads the price list data, and performs your own custom placeholder replacements.
I've done this on a few projects in order to pass multiple entity records into the template, or to insert complex tables into emails by loading data from relationships. See the screenshots below for an example of how I've configured the email template and dialog process to pass both an 'Account' and 'User' record into the email template.