Lookups Against Closed Records

In a recent post I included a thread between Bob Haverty and me regarding a question he’d emailed me and to which I didn’t have a good answer. I tweeted about it, included a link to the post and encouraged readers to post comments if they had any ideas about or answers to Bob’s question. The next day, Jukka Niiranen
was generous enough to post a suggestion and a link to an article by Jim Wang that solved Bob’s problem. Thanks Jukka!

Here’s the article by Jim Wang: http://jianwang.blogspot.com/2009/04/show-both-active-and-inactive-records.html

Here’s the URL of Jukka’s blog: http://niiranen.eu/crm/

This is actually a more general point than I thought at first. (Bob, next time you email me a question I’ll read it more carefully!) What it really has to do with is whether closed records show up in an entity’s Lookup view. By default they don’t, even though there’s no real reason they shouldn’t. You can see an example of this if you have an activity record – task, email, … take your pick – attached to an opportunity. If you close out the opportunity the activity record is still intact, and you can still see the opportunity record in the Regarding (lookup) field on the activity form. You can even click the link to the (now closed) opportunity record and navigate to its form, and verify that the record is closed. But I you tried to select the closed opportunity record from the lookup view, you can’t – closed records aren’t exposed there by default!

From a business standpoint there might be plenty of times when it’s appropriate to attach something like an email, phone call or a task to a closed record. What if you were sending an email to a colleague and wanted to make it regarding a previous opportunity that happened to be closed? Or how about if you were making a followup phone call regarding a case that had been resolved? By default, you can’t do any of these things, because closed records don’t show up in the lookup view.

To allow the attaching of an activity record to any closed record, all you have to do is customize the specific activity type (email, phone call, task, etc.), and add this code to the form load event:

crmForm.all.regardingobjectid.lookupclass = “alllookups”;

Here’s what the load event will look like if that’s all you have in there:

What does that “regardingobjectid” refer to? That’s simply the attribute name of the standard “Regarding” lookup field you see on every activity form in Dynamics CRM. You can see it here it is on the standard E-Mail form:

Since there’s only one “regardingobjectid” field, this will work no matter what kind of record type you want to attach the activity to! And remember, this means that after publishing these customizations, you will see a lot more records in your lookups than you did before…because now you see both active and inactive records! So, you might want to add the Status value to the Lookup views for important records. With the default settings that isn’t necessary since you won’t see any inactive records. But with the approach described here you’ll see all records and you might want to give your users the ability to distinguish between active and inactive ones. Here’s what my Regarding lookup view looks like now if I select the Opportunity entity, after I added Status to the Lookup view: