In this article, we are going to discuss different types of lookup controls in Dynamics CRM 2016 and their uses. Before jumping in to this discussion, let’s first understand what lookup control is.
Lookup is a special input type of control, which allows us to select value from an existing list. In Dynamics CRM, lookup represents an association with the entity. It can be the same entity.
Types of Lookup Control
Following are the different types of lookup controls in Dynamics CRM-
Standard Lookup Control
This lookup control represents a single association with current or another entity. We can create this type of lookup control, using lookup data type.
When we can select target entity type, let’s account for it and it will show us the list of the existing account records, while entering the data for this field.
We can also create a 1:N relationship to get lookup control on N side of the entity. For example, if we have two entities, A and B. We want to have lookup on entity B for entity A, we need to setup 1:N relationship between A and B.
Customer Lookup
This lookup type control allows us to select the customer entity records (Account and Contact). We can get this lookup now in CRM 2016 with the help of the customer data type. In the earlier version, there was no way to create a custom customer type lookup.
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You can refer our
earlier article for the customer data type.
Party List
This is a special type of lookup control, which represents an association with the multiple entities. There is no supported way of creating a party list lookup control in CRM at present. Common example of party list attributes are regardingobjectid, from and to fields in the activity entities.
We can’t create custom party list but as a workaround, we can create custom activity type entity, which will give us many party list attributes and we can reuse them for our requirement.