While in a CRM design meeting yesterday, we began discussing adding a picklist to one of the CRM forms. One of the other developers made the following remark: "This field is also on two other forms. Let's make it a lookup instead." Excellent advice, by the way, so let's discuss why.
Maintenance
If you have the same picklist data in multiple entities, you can accidentally create a maintenance issue. To keep the various picklists synchronized, changes made to any of the picklists must be replicated within the other picklists. Not only does this duplicate effort, it also requires someone with customization privileges.
The biggest drawback is that the picklist values must be exactly the same. If they are not, you run the risk of having value 10 mean "blue" in one Entity and "purple" in another.
By creating and using a custom entity with a Lookup, allows a user with lesser privileges to update the list. Plus, there is only one copy of the data, with each of the other entities pointing to that same data.
Relationships and Attribute Mapping
Mapping lookups between Entities is a bit easier than picklists because there is only a single copy of the data and you're actually passing a reference from one Entity to the next vs. passing an integer value representing the picklist selection.
Just something else to consider when designing customizations for CRM.
Greetings Everyone,
As most of you surely know, the next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM ( code-named Titan ), is quickly approaching.
As of yesterday, October 1st, Microsoft has released us from our NDA so we can now discuss what we've been working with for the past few months with the general public – that would be you.
I'll be posting articles and screencasts showing some of the cooler features in the coming weeks. In the mean time, please visit the following blogs for more information:
Phil Richardson
Titan Screencast- Add Multiple Users
Ben Riga
http://blogs.msdn.com/benriga/
Microsoft CRM Team Blog
I ran into an interesting issue a couple of weeks ago where a prospective customer was attempting to renew their Software Assurance (SA) plan and could not find the original subscription information.
On a hunch, I had him re-run the CRM Registration wizard. Much to our relief, the information originally recorded during the registration process was available – including the SA agreement number.
Something to keep in mind should something similar happen to you.
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