Data and Relationships

Clicking on the hyperlink of a record’s name will open the record. Additionally, if you are viewing a list of records, you can also highlight the record and select the Edit option or double-click in the open white space of a record’s row in that list.

A record’s data is presented on the Form for the record. A Form is a set of configured options that govern what information is displayed, what information is hidden, and how that information is organized in its presentation. A User can swap between Forms if they have permission to access more than one configured Form by selecting the arrow next to the Form name near the top right of the record and choosing from the available options.

Information on a record can be changed by selecting a field or area you wish to change and then providing the value that should be in that field. There are many different field types  some will require you to type in the response, some will have you pick from a list, and some will have you search for a record that should be connected to the record you are editing. Some fields may be locked for editing entirely (“read-only”) while others can only be viewed or edited by individuals with certain permissions.

After you have made updates to a record, saving it is possible via the save option on the command bar. If there are unsaved changes to a record, this will be noted near the top of the record. If you attempt to navigate away from a record while there are unsaved changes, you will be prompted to save the changes and continue or discard the changes. Some organizations also have auto-save enabled for records, meaning that the data will save after a certain period of time without any input from the user.

If you want to view a history of the record’s updates, you can access the Audit History for a record via the Related tab. This will display the date and times for edits made to fields on the records.

NOTE: Auditing for the organization, for the entity, and for the desired fields will need to be enabled by an administrator before entries as displayed in the Audit History for a record.

A record’s status can be identified by viewing the Status field. This field is typically in the Header for a record or is located on the body of the Form for the record. This information for the record is stored in the system regardless of whether the field is displayed on the Form and can be retrieved via more advanced methods if it is not displayed for a given record.

The difference between Status and Status Reason is that Status is a more general state for the record and Status Reason is a more specific state for that same record. For example, a record may be in an Active Status (meaning it is still being edited or processed), but it could be in the “New”, “In Progress”, or “Submitted” Status Reason. Similarly, a record could be in an Inactive Status (meaning work on it has been completed and it should no longer be updated), but it could be in the “Cancelled” or “Completed” Status Reasons.

A Contact is an individual person in the system and an Account is an organization, like a company, to which Contacts can belong. The Account entity is sometimes renamed to better fit the business-specific nomenclature, like changing the name of the entity to be “Programs”, “Offices”, or “Branches”.

Entity relationships can be simple or complex. A Contact may belong to a single Account but an Account may have many Contacts. A Contact may have many Orders, but that Order is related to one Contact. Similarly, an Order may have multiple Payments, but those Payments are all related to one Order.

The direction of a relationship is important (parent to child) and the extent of a relationship (one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many) can vary. Typically, you will create these relationships between records by filling in lookup fields or adding related records to sub-grids, indicating that two records or two pieces or data should be connected.

For a singular record, its related records can be viewed via the Related tab on the record’s Form. This will show all the entities that can be directly related to the record you are viewing. Selecting an option from that list will take you to a list of records of the selected entity type that are related to the record from which you started. It is also a common practice to display related records to an entity via sub-grids on the Form for a record. These are sections of the Form that use defined Views to display related entities’ records.

Note: A record may be indirectly related to another record  these kinds of relationships where the records are connected via several degrees or hops between records can potentially be collected into Views by an administrator. Some relationships, however, are to distant or too complex to be displayed via simple configuration and require either exporting and manipulating the data or advanced data analysis programs such as Power BI.

Customer data is anything that the users create in the system related to their business. These can be things like names and phone numbers on Contacts or lookup fields on Accounts indicating which Contact is in which major role. System/Configuration data is the data that helps the system support the business needs of a company and run properly. This kind of data can be presented in the manner of varying Form layouts for different entities, multiple Security Roles to indicate which User should be allowed which permissions, or scheduled system process that trigger on specific updates to customer data.

Note: Each D365 instance comes with some default system/configuration data, but does not come with pre-populated customer data. Customer data for a D365 system can either be migrated from other systems, input manually by users, or, for testing purposes, downloaded via available sample data from Microsoft.