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Activity view default filter, missing due dates and how to modify the filter

Jukka Niiranen January 23, 2012 27 Comments

Activity view default filter, missing due dates and how to modify the filter

Certain entities that contain the activity roll-up feature, namely accounts, contacts and opportunities, are also equipped with a date filter that allows you to choose whether you want to see all the activities related to the record or just a selected subset. By default this is “Next 30 days”, but you also can choose between “Overdue” or “Next 12 months”, or just go for “All”. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that this piece of helpful functionality has remained uncustomizable throughout different Dynamics CRM versions. A lot of users were annoyed with especially the same filter in the associated history view, nowadays known as Closed Activities view in CRM 2011, which used to default to “Last 30 days” and hide away all but the most recent email threads, appointments and other information that you might have been searching for. You always had to change the filter manually to “All” to uncover the historical information about the relationship with the account or contact. However, this has changed now in the latest version and “All” has become the default filter (or should I say the filter is off by default).

That’s definitely a step towards the right direction. It’s not exactly what the response on Microsoft Connect suggests, which claims that “we’ve allowed a user to change the default filter for associated views in CRM 2011”. I’ve yet run into such a setting and neither has The Great Internet, unless Google is hiding such instructions or blog posts. It would be useful to be able to configure or remove filters that the end users don’t want to deal with, without having to resort to unsupported customizations.

Open vs. closed activities

History is one thing but it’s the future actions that matter the most. Until very recently, I’d say up until Update Rollup 2 of CRM 2011 the filter functionality in the open activities associated views used to be such that the default “Next 30 days” would also show any activity that was missing a due date. By default the due dates are not a required field and sometimes they are not that practical for the CRM users, as many things in the daily life of a modern information worker don’t have strict deadlines. Also, there’s no out-of-the-box functionality in Dynamics CRM to set default values for date fields either, so setting the exact due date for every task or phone call you enter on your task list may feel too bureaucratic. An activity with a missing date should be considered as “do this as soon as you can, given all the surrounding factors”, in my personal opinion.

In the current version of Update Rollup 5 the “Filter on” value is applied in such a way that it by default hides away all activities that don’t meet the “Next 30 days” criteria. If the due date is blank, the activities won’t show under the account/contact/opportunity. This may seem quite confusing to the user, since any new activity that he or she creates for the record will appear to “vanish” into thin air after clicking “Save and close”. In the My Activities view they will still appear on the top of the list, as null values in the Due Date column are sorted on top.

What’s even more confusing is that CRM 2011 introduces two different ways for users to navigate to related activities on the account form: the familiar associated view and the new subgrid. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that subgrids ain’t exactly what associated views used to be. They don’t contain the activity roll-up feature, so you won’t see those activities that are set regarding a child record of an account (for example, opportunities) instead of the account record directly. Just like another filter, except you can’t even change it.

How to change the default filter value

There’s been numerous blog posts written on the topic of setting the filter defaults on CRM 4.0, but I was initially a bit surprised I couldn’t find a working piece of Javascript to achieve this on CRM 2011. Examples like this, this or this didn’t seem to be working for me, but luckily I ran into this post on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM German forum by Andreas Buchinger. To save you the trouble of Google Translate (well, it’s not much trouble at all when using Chrome’s built-in translation toolbar), here’s a walk through of the steps needed.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Annoyances, Tips Tagged With: activities, crm2011, customization, form, script, subgrid, usability, views

CRM 2011 subgrids ain’t what associated views used to be

Jukka Niiranen June 20, 2011 13 Comments

CRM 2011 subgrids ain’t what associated views used to be

Back in the days before we had Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 available, it was a commonplace customization to show entities related to the parent entity directly on the parent’s form by utilizing an iFrame. Making information such as latest history items (nowadays called closed activities) quickly visible to any user opening the form is often justified, as one key functions of a CRM system is to share information about what interaction has taken place with the customer. Referencing the URL of the related view on the iFrame was not exactly supported, but it was a relatively safe customization to apply nonetheless.

Due to popular demand, Microsoft introduced an official method for achieving this UI customization in CRM 2011 through the use of the form sub-grid element. As a part of the entity forms redesign, the subgrids have now become an out-of-the-box feature on several default entities, such as accounts, contacts and opportunities.

Different navigation points, different views

It’s important to note that subgrids don’t use the entity associated view definition, which is applied when traditionally navigating to the view by using left side menu items on an entity form. Instead they allow you to separately choose a filter to “view only related records”, in combination with any of the system views available for the entity in question (but not the associated views, as those are “special” views). 9 times out of 10 you’ll want to keep the filter on, as showing non-related records on the entity’s form would under normal circumstances defy the standard UI logic of how Dynamics CRM presents records in different windows.

OK, fair enough, so that’s why the columns in a subgrid aren’t updated after you edit the entity related view, like you used to do in CRM 4.0 and previous versions. We can live with that. In order to provide a consistent user experience, I would recommend that these two views are set up so that they have identical contents. This is because an “oldskool” CRM user may navigate through the left side menu by habbit, whereas a person new to Dynamics CRM will probably prefer to just scroll through the form. Sadly there’s no “save as” functionality available on the entity related view, and you can’t promote a normal view to become a related view (since there’s only one of them). This means you have to manually configure the two views to be indentical in terms of attributes, column order, width, sorting and (in some cases) filters.

Rolling up the records

Another thing that may surprise a seasoned Dynamics CRM consultant until he learns the tricks of the latest version is that the aforementioned feature has further implications specific to accounts and opportunities in particular. As we’ve come to know, these entities have special capabilities enabled in the activity views: the roll-up functionality. Instead of being restricted to only activities directly related to a record, we can actually see a bit further. Let’s take a simple example of an account and it’s open activity associated view:

It’s that “Include Related Regarding Records” selection above the grid which allows us to view activities not only related to the account itself but also the ones regarding a contact of the account and an opportunity related to it. Pretty neat, as it’s often the people working at an account that we associate communication and activities to, such as emails and appointments.

Now, let’s take advatage of the new CRM 2011 functionalities and look at the activity subgrid that’s conveniently available in the out-of-the-box configuration of an account form:

Huh? Where did my activities go? They’re still there, but this particular navigation path will not allow you to view them, since you’re on a subgrid and, as we previously concluded, subgrids can’t show the entity associated view. This means there’s no way for you to apply the “Including Related Regarding Records” functionality over here.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve fallen for this trap in customer demos more than once. The menu anchor for accessing the Notes & Activities subgrid is just too tempting to click, when what you really intended to do was to view the fully featured activity associated view and access a complete list of the related activities. If the difference between view columns was a minor inconvenience, then this is downright misleading to many users I’m sure.

The quick solution for this would be to just remove the activity subgrids from the account and opportunity entity forms where the results can be contradicting, thus forcing the user to navigate through the old fashioned menus into the related activities views. Another option would be to perform the old iFrame trick and just embed this view onto a form iFrame, which does sound a bit 4.0-ish. The last option is to go and vote on Dynamics 365 Ideas site, requesting MS to include the full roll-up functionality for subgrid views in a future version of Dynamics CRM. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Features, Tips Tagged With: activities, crm2011, customization, reports, subgrid, views

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I'm a Microsoft Business Applications MVP from Finland, having worked with the Dynamics 365/CRM system since 2005 and in the field of customer relationship management for over 15 years now. Whenever I feel like saying a thing or two to about Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, I may post it here on my blog, tweet it, save it to my XRM links or post it on Google+.





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