How to Change Icons of Custom Entities in Dynamics 365

Dominic Jarvis, 22 September 2017

Once you’ve created your custom entities in Microsoft Dynamics 365, you’ll probably want to give them custom icons to make them more easily recognisable, and to give the entities a more finished feel.

Thankfully, this is very easy to do in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Simply acquire the image that you want to use as the icon for the entity, then create two copies of the icon, of sizes:

• 32 x 32 px
• 16 x 16 px

The reason for this is that Microsoft Dynamics 365 uses the two differently sized icons in different places. For example, the 32 x 32 px image is used in the site map, while the 16 x 16 px image is used in lookup fields.

In order to use an image as an icon, the image must first be uploaded as a web resource formatted as a .png, .gif, or .jpg. The image also must be smaller than 10 kB.

When you’ve uploaded your desired image, navigate to you custom entity in the solution explorer in Dynamics 365, and select the update icons button at the top of the window. This will open a wizard which will allow you to select your image.

Some Considerations

When selecting an image, you may want to consider using a vector image, as these scale very nicely, and remain sharp no matter the resolution. Also, in interests of keeping things consistent, consider either styling the icons to remain consistent with the out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 icons (white on a transparent background, material design), or making all of the icons for your custom entities consistent in some way.