Many to Many Relationships and Advanced Find

In another article I discussed the different kinds of entity relationships that can be created in Dynamics CRM 4, and in particular, how to create many to many (a.k.a. “N:N”) relationships. But once you’ve created an N:N relationship and entered some related information, how can you tell what’s related? Advanced Find works great for this, but as David Challener pointed out in a recent comment on my article, it’s not exposed very obviously within the AF UI.

Anyway, here’s a short video that shows how to create an N:N relationship, and how to create an Advanced Find query to see which records are related:

October 23, 2009 · Filed under Customization, Tips, Tricks, Q&A

3 Comments »

  1. tommc Said,

    May 3, 2011 @ 6:12 am

    Hi,

    I had an issue with this in CRM 2011 where i created a many to many relationship but it did not appear in the Related Entities list within Advanced Find. I eventually discovered that it was because within the definition of the relationship i had selected “Do Not Display” as the Display Option on both sides. This seems to prevent the entity from displaying in Advanced Find also.

    Not sure if this was the same issue in CRM 4.0, but hopefully this may be of use to anyone desperately trying to figure out why it doesn’t appear!

  2. Richard Knudson Said,

    May 5, 2011 @ 11:24 am

    Good catch, tommc.

    I’d never noticed that before, but I just tried it and got the same result you did. btw, the general topic of N:N relationships is one I get a lot of questions on. I’m just finishing up an article on how they work in CRM 2011, and I’ll be interested in your feedback when I post it.

    Thanks for reading!

  3. Eberhard Fecher Said,

    October 12, 2011 @ 3:04 pm

    Hi Richard, thank you very much for your input on n:n. It helped me clarify a lot. However we seem to be running into a problem with Advanced Find that also the manual n:n approach does not seem to be solving.
    Using your example I am trying to select all contacts that are members of Association 1 AND also of Association 2. It is no problem do find all contacts that are in Association 1 OR in Association 2

    Any help would be appreciated.

    Eberhard Fecher
    fecher.e.Kfm.

Leave a Comment