All about the *new* Hierarchy Settings in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Any powerful software could easily fail when it does not meet this one criteria

'User-friendliness' 

And more increasingly these days, if there is no way for the user to 'visualize' their data, your software is termed  non-purposeful. 

Dynamics CRM is a very powerful tool that has been helping millions of businesses around the world manage their client relationships efficiently and effectively. And, those who have been working with CRM for a while, wanting some great tools for data visualization; CRM 2015 has something in for you. It is called 'Hierarchy Settings' under the Customization panel

How cool would it be to visualize all the projects that your company is doing now, with respect to different parent/child units? Or, may be your company has hundreds of accounts, and you need a way to visualize parent accounts with their sub-accounts in a hierarchy, and not as a plain-boring list! CRM 2015 has the solution for you. 

Let me demonstrate how this can be done.

Scenario -  My organization has 10 or fewer (small number for the purpose of demonstration) projects. I need to view the projects in a tile form with parent-child relationships, with a few important custom fields on the tile- like, Project Name, Project Amount, Customer Name and Parent Project.

Answer - Hierarchy Settings

Excited to see where this new feature is located at?

Login to your CRM 2015 domain and navigate to your solution. Create a custom entity titled,'Project' and expand the entity to view the config tool called 'Hierarchy Settings' at the very bottom (within the entity). In this case, we haven't configured the settings yet. So ignore the record displayed under the Hierarchy Settings in my screenshot below (for now)..

Returning back to the steps, 

After creating Project, a custom entity, we are going to create a self-referential relationship for setting up our hierarchy visualization. 

Under custom entity, Project - create a new 1:N relationship/ N:1 between Project and itself. Look at the screenshot below

See, how I have given 'Yes' for hierarchical, after choosing 'Project' as the related entity. This is called, a self-referential relationship. Or, in other words, an entity refers to itself through the lookup field. And, thus- I have named the lookup field to be 'Parent Project'.

Best practice- Do not make this 'Business Required', or you would never have a parent project which is like God (Remember, God has no parents!). Keep it Optional/Business Recommended. 

Now, let us just go ahead and create some additional custom fields, and add those to our Main and/or Mobile Express forms

We will even create a Quick View form with the four most important records to be displayed in our Hierarchy tile view. 

Now, let us navigate to the custom entity called Project, click on Hierarchy Settings and create a new one. Choose the quick view form that we just created, as shown below:

See 'Mark a relationship as enabled for hierarchies'? Click on that

Choose the record, and click on 'Mark Hierarchical', and click on Done after that. 

Publish All your customizations within the solution, and that's it. 

It's testing time now!

Navigate to Projects (mine is under the Sales tab)

Add as many projects as you want, specifying parent/child relationships using the lookup field on the form. You must have a list like this-

You can click on the hierarchy icon by the side of the individual records (see screenshot above) , to view the same at the record level.

This is how hierarchy visualization looks like- 

And, you can always click on each tile to launch the quick view form like this - 

Tada! Now you know all you need to know about Hierarchy Settings. Or, do you?

This is all great!

But what are the limitations to this feature? 

• Only one (1: N) self-referential relationship per entity can be set as hierarchical. In this relationship the primary entity and the related entity must be of the same type, such as account_parent_account or contact_parent_contact
• Presently, a hierarchy or visualization is based on one entity only. You can depict the account hierarchy showing accounts at multiple levels, but you can’t show accounts and contacts in the same hierarchy visualization.
• Maximum number of fields that can be displayed in a tile (quick view form tile) is four. If you add more fields to the Quick View Form that is used for the tile view, only the first four fields will be displayed.

Aside those minor limitations- Surely, a picture is more than a thousand words, right? :)