Edit and nest grids with the new “Grid control” feature in Dynamics 365 CRM
Dynamics 365 CRM users were eagerly awaiting enhancements to grids, and this new Grid control feature is the natural evolution from the previous read-only grid control and editable grids in model-driven apps. With it, you can now edit grids and add nested grids in groupings, making it much easier to see the target data in one location. Let’s check out the other features it offers, as well.
GRID CONTROL FEATURE OPTIONS
First and foremost is editing grids and adding nested grids within a grid. With nested grids, you can expand a row or multiple rows at a time to see related records. This is extremely helpful for fast lookup of data without having to navigate away from a core location in CRM.
There are several additional capabilities you can enable for grids. You can edit the grid, which you’ll be able to recognize due to vertical grid lines appearing between columns, and also filter for columns header dropdowns.
The default to browse through the data is now infinite scroll, but you can also enable pagination to resurface the jump bar, which are the A-Z hyperlinks at the bottom of many pages that allow you to hop to a specific area of the alphabetized records to browse. Additionally helpful for searching through grids is that you can set lookup controls can render as hyperlinks.
The jump bar - or pagination - in Dynamics 365 CRM applications. Alternately, you can enable infinite scroll.
Visual customization for columns can now allow you to change the color for Option Set fields; a strong use of this may be, for example, changing the colors of a status field within the view. Priority statuses would be red, while standard statuses may be blue, and so forth.
You can now run scripts on lines within the grid, which will refresh faster (rather than having to complete a full page refresh) and allow more immediate and cleaner assessment of scripts while working in grids.
KNOWN LIMITATIONS
There are some bugs that are still being worked out as part of the Preview feature’s quality assurance stage of development. Among them are things like the jump bar is not yet available in a card view, no icons for context menu commands in a card list view, and the list view doesn’t display custom cards for the table.
Preview features can be enabled in both sandbox and production environments, but we’d advise caution for enabling preview features in production environments for exactly this reason. Test them in your sandbox environment instead!
If you want to independently keep track of release plans for certain features or functionalities, check out the new Release Planner Tool, which helps you find and track development and when a feature is set to be generally available. Learn more about the Release Wave Planner →
Your Syvantis team is happy to provide you with information and training for new features you are interested in enabling in your system, and we’ll always assess the feature to vet if it will fit your needs. Just let us know.