SearchMicrosoft Dynamics 365 is here, and with it comes a host of new features. There’s one that I’m excited about, and I think has been a long time coming – editable grids. This is primarily a navigational convenience, but one that I think is worth getting excited about. Editable grids allow users to make mass updates to multiple records from a single page, without having to open the records themselves.
Let’s say I want to update multiple Cases to have a priority of “Low”. With regular read-only grid views, I would have to open each record, update the priority, close the record, navigate back to the grid view, and find the next record. Once I got to around 10 – 20 or so, I’d probably start thinking about writing a workflow to do the updates for me. And if I have to do it from a mobile device, I’d probably start thinking about applying for a new job…
Ok, maybe not. But, it would still be annoying.
With editable grids, I can just update multiple records directly. I added an editable grid control to my Cases, and here’s what it looks like:
So, how did I make my Case grid view editable? If I open the entity itself from a solution, there’s a new option called “Controls”. If I click that, and then click “Add Control”:
That brings up a dialog box that allows me to choose what kind of control I want to add. Select “Editable Grid”:
Then, I just tell it which I want to be the default control for the Case entity. So in the example below, I have enabled the editable grid for Phone and Tablet, but had the (boring old) read-only grid enabled for the Web interface:
Pretty cool, right?
