Blog

The Unified Interface in Dynamics 365 provides a plethora of custom controls to help your users to visualize data and streamline data entry. This blog will briefly review five of my favorite UI field-level custom controls to help increase user adoption. For detailed assistance on applying any of these features in your system, please feel free to reach out to me – I’m happy to help! Fill out our Contact Form with details about what you’re working on, or email me directly at heidi@reenhanced.com.

Here are the five UI custom controls we love implementing for our customers:

Let’s take a few minutes to review how and where to implement custom controls, and how to set scope levels for each.

Each custom control can all be defined at the Web, Phone and Tablet levels, allowing you to tailor user experience based on the device used. Definitions of the clients are fairly straight-forward, but let’s briefly review what each of these options means to you as the system administrator/customizer:

• Web: selecting the Web client for a control means users will see this control when they access Dynamics 365 from any web browser.
• Phone: Make the control available on any mobile device running Dynamics 365 for Phones.
• Tablet: Make the control available on any tablet device running Dynamics 365 for Tablets.

Where do you find these incredibly fantastic controls that will help your users? Easy peasy! If you want to enable custom controls on a field, it is applied at the form level. Follow these three simple steps to get started.

1. First, open a solution file using the classic solution designer. From the Solution Explorer, expand Entities, expand Accounts (in this example) and select the Form you want to use.

2. Next, from the form designer, open the field you want to add a custom control on.

3. Finally, on the Field Properties page and select the Controls tab. Then, select Add Control.

If you apply a Linear Slider custom control to a field on a form, it will look like this:

Field Types that work with a linear slider include:
– Whole Number
– Decimal
– Currency

To apply this custom control, you will need to set a min, max and step (increment) properties.

Real-world example: Add a linear slider on the Opportunity form to visually set budget amount.

If you apply a flip switch custom control to a field on a form, it will look like this:

Field types that work with a flip switch:
– Two Options

Real-world example: Sales reps identify an Opportunity as Commercial or Residential.

If you apply a star rating custom control to a field on a form, it will look like this:

Field types that work with a star rating:
– Whole Number

This will set the value of the field to be 1 – 5. It is a frequently used field control for organizations, especially for mobile users.

Real-world example: An Opportunity can be rated 1-5 to help determine priority.

If you apply an auto-complete custom control to a field on a form, it will look like this:

Field types that work with auto-complete:
– Text

Note: You will have to configure properties on this control, establishing source to pull in data for the auto-complete.

Real-world example: The out-of-the-box State/Province field is a text field. Applying this control allows a user to be presented with options from a State entity.

If you apply an input mask custom control to a field on a form, it will look like this:

Field types that work with input mask:
– Text

Use this for any single line of text field where you need to input a specific format (like a phone number) to ensure streamlined data input and formatting. This is an amazing feat to be done simply through configuration – this sort of solution used to require JavaScript!

Note: You will have to configure values for each property before implementing this control.

Real-world example: Phone numbers must be properly formatted without using JavaScript.