On August 7-9, the first ever Virtual Summer Camp for the Dynamics 365 platform will take place.

During this free event the D365UG offer some 30+ sessions with focus on Customer Service and Field/Project Service.

I will be doing one of a few cross vertical sessions, where I discuss and demonstrate some useful XrmToolBox tools that help customizers, administrators and users with information analysis and enhancing the capabilities of the system.

Below is a description of my session – enjoy and make sure you sign up! Click the link: D365UG Virtual Summer Camp

Session abstract

Customizing views has been possible forever through customizations, and later also the Advanced Find. We do this all the time to tailor our systems and to personalize our experience.

Over the years however, the capabilities of the query language in the Dynamics 365 platform – FetchXML – has evolved at a higher pace than the UI. We now have a situation where we know what is theoretically possible, but we cannot access all those querying features.

…unless there was some free community driven tool, to investigate the data and even help us alter the underlying queries of views…

Another problem we may face is related to the “R” in “XRM”. We are dealing with relationships, and the information is stored in a relational database.

When setting up the system you specify a number of options for the relationship behavior on each relation between entities. But as a user it is not possible to see how the relationships are configured, so when performing actions on a record (delete, reassign, share etc) there is no way of knowing how that action affects related records in the system.

…unless there was some free community driven tool, to give us “previews” of which related records that are affected by an action on a record…

Luckily, these tools do exist.

In this session you will learn the dos and don’ts of altering view queries using FetchXML Builder for XrmToolBox, and see some common scenarios where altering view queries can provide more business relevant filtering of records.

You will also see a few other more or less known features of FetchXML Builder, to make the experience fit your own taste and needs.

To add even more value, we will use the View Designer tool where you through tool-to-tool integration with FetchXML Builder can change both the layout and the query of views.

In the second part of this session, you will learn how the new tool Related Records Analyzer can be used to investigate information hierarchies, depending on relationship behavior for various cascade configurations. You will see how to specify the relations you want to investigate, traverse from a single parent record through the information hierarchies of the matching relationship types.

Using this tool helps you understand why some records just cannot be deleted, which records that will follow when its parent is reassigned to another user, and many other practical implementations of the cascade options available in the platform.

Recording

Update: The session was recorded and is now available for viewing on the D365UG web page! Follow this link:
FetchXML Builder and Friends at D365UG Virtual Summer Camp, provided by D365UG

Update 2: I have now received permission from D365UG to share the recording! Follow this link:
FetchXML Builder and Friends at D365UG Virtual Summer Camp, provided by Jonas Rapp