User using Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement will be very well aware of the lookups available in the system. They are the major components which helps us to keep the relationships between the table and also indirectly keeping the data clean to some extend. Recently Microsoft has brought new feature call advanced lookup for these types of fields to enable some usability related enhancements thus helps us to explore and find the required data easily thus improving the productivity of the end user. This also helps us to apply filters to the records available. In this blog we will see what are the advantages users will get by enabling this feature and how to enable this feature in our environment.
This new feature helps the end users in many ways. For example, most of us might have faced a scenario where we see two records of same name in a lookup. Now with this new feature, along with the name we can also see other columns thus differentiate between two records which has the same name may be via address or any other column. We can also see the results quickly with the typeahead search which filters the data as we keep on typing each letter in the search box. That means we don’t have to type, then search, then type again, pretty cool right? This also helps us to explore the data within the advanced lookup window and make any changes if required without losing the context on what we were working on. As we saw we have a search feature, we also have a filter feature available to filter the records like filter my records or filter by related and so on. When it comes to fields like party list where we have to filter and select multiple records we can do that with a cleaner layout and with fewer clicks.
Enabling Advanced Lookup through Power Apps Admin Tool
To enable the advanced lookup in your environment, the user should be an admin and only once the admin enabled this in the system, then only other users can start using this. As an admin, you have to login to the admin portal using your credentials and select the environment where you want to enable this. Navigate to the settings and from there to the basic behavior section. In the page which gets loaded for basic behavior, you could see the “Lookup behavior” section towards the bottom right hand corner of the screen. Enable this and then set the values for minimum characters to trigger typeahead search and delay between character inputs. In the minimum character give something meaningful for your business case but the delay can only be entered something above 250ms as that is the minimum value. Save your changes and you should be ready to go.
As we move forward Microsoft is introducing cooler experience for the end users and looking forward for more like this. You can read the official announcement at Advanced Lookup experience in model-driven Power Apps. Hope you enjoyed the blog and it was helpful.
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