Clone Records using Entity Relationships

Different Approaches to “Record Cloning”

In another article I described how you can use a simple workflow to implement a “record cloning” function in Dynamics CRM. There’s an alternative approach which takes advantage of one of the three new kinds of entity relationships you can create in the Dynamics CRM 4.0 version: namely, the ability to create “self-referential” relationships. In plain(er) English, this lets you create 1:N or parent-child relationships between records of the same type.

For example, you might have a case record with other related case records. Or a parent opportunity record with several associated “child” records. True to the dictum that if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, once you know how to clone records you’ll be surprised at how many different scenarios you can use it for.

How this Approach Works

For the entity-relationship approach, you need a security role like System Administrator, so you can customize the entity you need to clone and publish those customizations. That’s one of the most important differences, by the way, between this and the workflow approach. (More on that later). Assuming you can do that, this is essentially a two-step process (using the Opportunity entity to illustrate):

1. Customize the Opportunity entity, and create a new 1:N relationship from Opportunity to Opportunity. Give it a good name and accept most of the default options.
2. Once you’ve got the relationship created, you can create “mapped fields” for the fields you want auto-populated from the parent record to each new child record.

After you publish your customizations, that’s pretty much it. I’ll write this up in more detail shortly, but in the meantime, here’s a video I uploaded to my YouTube channel that walks through it step by step: