Display all Related Activities in One View Dynamics CRM 2011

Paul Nieuwelaar, 19 December 2012

In Dynamics CRM 2011, when we want to view related activities for a particular record, such as an Account, we can go through the left-nav Activities or Closed Activities related entities, or use the Activities sub-grid on the form under the Notes & Activities tab.

Unfortunately with the sub-grid, we can only see Activities directly regarding the current record, and so any E-mails or related regarding records will not appear. Usually it’s a good idea to remove this sub-grid from the form as to avoid confusion from users.

On our left-nav, we have the Activities and Closed Activities. By default, the ‘Activities’ shows all Active/Open Activities for this record, and the ‘Closed Activities’ shows all Activities for this record that have been either Completed or Cancelled.

If we wanted to display ALL our activities in one place, instead of having to click between Activities and Closed Activities, we could perform some simple customizations to make this possible.

Fortunately, the Activities and Closed Activities just use standard views like any other related entity, so we can open the Activities entity in the customizations area to modify these views.

While we can customize either of these views, there is actually some hidden filters on the closed Activity Associated View, in that even if we remove all filters (so it should display all activities) it still filters to only show closed activities. However, the Open Activity Associated View does not have the same restriction, so we can remove the current filters to include all activities.

We can also optionally rename this view to ‘All Activity Associated View’ for example so it doesn’t confuse anyone. It would also make sense to change to sorting of this view to use Due Date or Created On, as by default it is by Subject.

After saving and publishing the view, we can then check our Account again, and see that when we click on Activities now from the left-nav, we see all activities whether they are open or closed. We can still filter this by open/closed by changing the view to either Open Activities or Closed Activities.

Note that we could have done this in the sub-grid as well by simply changing the sub-grid view to use ‘All Activities’, however as mentioned earlier the sub-grid doesn’t includes related activities, and so this is not recommended.

You may also want to default the ‘Filter on’ option to ‘All’ instead of the default ‘Next 30 days’, however this is unsupported. For more information about this check out this blog post.