It seems like Microsoft is listening and are improving their products according to feedback provided. Albeit a bit slow sometimes, however, things are improving.
Now it is possible to find records that do not have a related record
With Spring ’18 release Advanced Find has been updated with a very useful feature.
Now it is possible to find records that do not have a related record.
Example – Cases with Tasks associated with them
A typical scenario can be where Tasks are assigned to staff members for cases raised.
In the past it has been straightforward to locate Cases where tasks are associated with a Case with certain criteria defined.
As seen in Figure 1, above, old Advanced Find will search for related records with a criteria selected and return all the cases where any associated Tasks are due on 18/06/2018.
There is no feature or option to find Cases that do not have any Tasks associated with it.
Inability to search for records that do not have associated records causes major issues for clients. How do you find those records????
Help is at hand in Dynamics 365 Spring ’18 release.
As it can be seen Microsoft has added extra option for a related Entity line. Now it is possible to select ‘Does Not Contain Data’ option for related Entity.
In the above example, figure 2, this will result in displaying all the Cases in the system that do not have any Tasks associated with them.
In the previous versions this was a difficult task to achieve.
I feel this new feature in Advanced Find is a very useful addition and will help companies in various ways.
I also hope highlighting of this feature will assist users in creating new queries and resolve some of the issues that are being faced daily.
Please feel free to leave any comments.
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