Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 – Enable Custom Entity for Business Process Flows

Greg Olsen, 13 April 2014

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 extended the feature set with Business Process Flows, to allow for the creation of Business Process Flows for any entity including custom entities.



Business Process Flows in CRM 2013 is a feature customers frequently ask about and on occasions is the one (but not limited to one) of the major benefits of moving to CRM 2013 in their mind.

This blog post will highlight how to enable your new or existing custom (custom means not supplied by CRM 2013 out-of-the-box) entities to be ready for use within the Business Process Flow.

Enable your custom entity for Business Process Flow
If you are creating a new custom entity, make sure the option of Business process flows (fields will be created) is checked or selected.

If the entity has already been created, you can simply open the existing custom entity and check or select the option Business process flows (fields will be created).

Save your change.

In my example shown below, I have created a new entity called Booking and enabled the feature.



So effectively the enabling process is now complete. 

More Information
When you checked or selected the option, you will see the is some text at the end of the option which reads (fields will be created). What this means is that 2 new fields will be added to the entity field list to allow a Business Process Flow to be added.

Fields are:
  •  Process Id
  •  Stage Id



When you start creating a new Process (Settings > Processes) you can choose a Category of the Process. By default, no Category is selected, therefore showing you all entities available for Processes. This is shown below.



Once you select a Category of Business Process Flow, your custom entity will be available for selection. This is shown below.



So no real change from the previous list. But you may notice one entity in the list missing. Let’s talk about that next. If you spotted Booking2 missing from the list, you would be right.

My other entity called Booking2 is missing because it is not enabled for Business Process Flows. The screenshot below shows I have not selected the option Business process flows (fields will be created)



That’s how easy it is to Enable your custom entity for Business Process Flow.