OVERVIEW

Applies to: CRM 2013 and CRM Online Fall ‘13

• New capabilities in CRM lookups
• Step By Step Walkthrough
• Search data added to new record forms
• Creating new records inline from a lookup
• Customization Support
• Limitations

New capabilities in CRM lookups

New capabilities in lookup controls help you create a related record quickly and easily. Gone is the pain of multiple clicks: clicking on the lookup icon, launching the lookup dialog and then clicking a new button just to launch the form of a related record. And even after these steps record is not yet created!

This has been drastically improved with the new functionality of lookup controls. You are no longer required to perform multiple clicks and scroll through lengthy forms to look for the field where you want to put data just to create a record.

To save you time and effort we have added “quick create forms” for some entities (Account, Campaign Response, Case, Competitor, Contact, Lead, Opportunity) which are ready to use. You can also customize these quick create forms according to your needs or create them for other entities as you need them.

In this blog I’ll walk you through the new user experience using an example where we would be creating a new related contact record for an already existing account record in CRM. After which I’ll talk about the availability and limitations of this feature.

Step By Step Walkthrough

1. In CRM  navigate to accounts list and open an account record you want to associate to a contact.

2. Click on the lookup icon. In this case as shown above UI click on “Primary Contact” lookup search icon. An inline menu has a +New link as shown below.
 

3. Clicking on the +New   link opens a Quick Create form. You can see that this is a smaller form containing only essential fields.
Certain data from the originating record can be copied over to the new record automatically. What data is copied depends on the attributes mapped in the relationship.
See Edit attribute mappings for more information. You just need to fill the name of the contact and if you want to modify some other data you can do that right here and click Save.

4. When you click Save a new record is created for you and automatically linked with your account record as shown below. Save the account record and the newly created contact record is associated with the account record.

Search data added to new record forms 

 If you search for a related record in the lookup and can’t find it, when you click the  +New link the system tries to add the text of your search text to the correct field in the new record form. This small change means you may not have to enter the same data twice.

 For example, let’s say you are on an Account record and searched for a related contact with email address someone@example.com. 

 When you click the +New link, the search text is automatically added to the email field as shown below.

 Currently this functionality is available for customer, contact and account lookups only and for contact’s last name, contact’s primary email address, account name and account’s primary email address fields.

Creating new records inline from a lookup

The ability to create new records inline from a lookup is available for following types of lookup for all CRM users who have privileges to create that type of entity.
The link to create new records is not displayed if people do not have the create privilege.
When a quick create form is not available for an entity then its full form is launched.

Customization Support

 Customize quick create form

The Form editor can be used to customize the quick create form.

For complete documentation on customizing forms see Create and design forms in the Customization Guide (found within the Implementation Guide download).

Edit attribute mappings

You can control what data is pre-populated in a form for a new related record by editing the attribute mappings for the relationship between the two entities. See Mapping entity fields  section in the Customization Guide topic Create and edit entity relationships for more information.

 Limitations

1. The ability to change the default entity for quick create action in case of customer and party list lookup is not possible in this release.
2. Quick create functionality is not present in lookup controls of quick and classic forms. It is only present for entities updated for the new user experience.

Cheers,

Huma Ramawat
Microsoft Dynamics CRM

365blog

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