Getting Wrong Tooltip Information for Subgrids in Microsoft Dynamics 365

Dominic Jarvis, 14 October 2017

Grids are used almost everywhere in Microsoft Dynamics 365, from the main entity view, to associated grids on forms.

Generally, when using grids in Microsoft Dynamics 365, a user will hover over the cell of a grid to try get more information from a field – which is particularly helpful when column widths truncate fields.

A user may occasionally encounter a situation where the information in a cell is not displayed in the tooltip, and instead the count of the records in a view is displayed.

What is the reason for this?

When hovering over the borders of a cell in a grid, the tooltip has no particular cell to get information from, and so just gives a count of the records in the grid.

The margins for grids in Dynamics 365 allows the information contained within to be displayed without clutter/interference from other cells, but also due to this, the area which triggers the tooltip for the cell is small – and can be approximately the height of the text contained within the cell. From a brief play around, the area which this happens seems to be larger when using Google Chrome also, as opposed to Internet Explorer.

This leads to occasional times when instead of being presented with the expected information, the user may be presented with the total count of rows in a grid, which can lead to confusion. This is possibly due to the margin area of the borders being larger than you might reasonably expect. Below is an example from Chrome’s element inspector which displays the area of the padding.

  Note that if the mouse is hovered anywhere over the green area, the tooltip displayed will be the count of records, not the information contained within the cell.

An Additional Quirk

For some types of fields, the tooltip information displayed will also be different depending on the location of the tooltip in the cell. Below is an example of the ‘Main Phone’ field on an account, where the tooltip information is different depending on where the mouse is hovered. This seems to be by design – as the tooltip provides context specific information (Skype for Business calls) – but again can be the cause of some confusion.

Hovering over the phone cell

 
Hovering directly over the phone text