Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Hierarchies

Roshan Mehta, 18 September 2014

This feature has been requested over and over and I can gladly say it is finally available out of the box! Yes, I’m talking about the ability to view a hierarchy of records in a tree view from within your Dynamics CRM 2015 system. This feature is available for the Account, Campaign, Case, Contact, Opportunity, Order, Product, Quote, Team, and User entities, but is only enabled out of the box for the Account, Product and User entities.

Firstly, let’s take a look at how this work for Accounts. I have setup four Accounts in Dynamics CRM 2015 where none of the Accounts are related to one another. The screenshot below shows what this looks like in the “Active Accounts” view – nothing special here.



It would make more sense if the “Magnetism” account was the top-level entity, with each of the other accounts sitting beneath it as sub-accounts. We can achieve this by setting the Parent Account field on each of these records.



After saving these accounts, you will notice a new button is displayed next to the “Previous” and “Next” record buttons on the form. This button tells the user that this particular account has a hierarchical relationship with other accounts.



Clicking on this button displays a hierarchical view of related accounts where the one highlighted in orange represents the record that you were currently working on.



Each record is displayed on a separate tile and the user can select a different tile to open the record. To the left of the hierarchical view, we have a navigation control. Clicking on a specific link on this control highlights the associated item in the hierarchical view.




If we go back to the “Active Accounts” view, we will see that the button is available next to each related account to view the hierarchy of accounts.



As mentioned above, the hierarchical view is available for a number of entities, including the User entity. Selecting a particular tile in the tree only displays the direct children of that record and an overflow button is available to click to view records further down the tree.



The hierarchical view is customizable for out of the box and custom entities and the information shown on the tiles can also be modified. We will take a look at these customization features in my next post.