Configure Rollup view for activities with Dynamics CRM/365

Introduction:

This is another “big” enhancement that I am sure a lot of us had been waiting for. This has now been enabled for Account and Contact Entities.

Ever since Dynamics CRM has been around, you would have seen the activities view on CRM has a drop-down for filtering the view with the following options.

This record only – Shows all activities that have this account/contact set as the regarding.

Related Regarding Records – This was a special filter. This automatically did a rollup of all activities associated with the account/contact. It used the following conditions for selection

1. Activity associated with a child account or contact of the selected record.
2. Child Account or contact in the To/From (Activity party) of the activity.
3. Activity has the regarding set to an Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice, Case and Contract, a limited list of OOB entities.

If you created a custom entity that was parented by the Account or Contact and had activities created against this custom entity, they would not be displayed on the Account or Contact activities view even with the Related Regarding filter enabled.

Can we see them all now?

With this customization level setting, you can now have the activities related to custom entities roll up to the account/contact. A single view of all activity history associated with the parent record.

Event is the custom entity in our example, you can see the activity related to the Event also show up in this view.

How to set this up?

The setting is available for configuration in the relationship settings. For every child record that you have parented with Account or Contact there would be a related 1:N relation created.

In this example we created a simple Event entity with a Customer type of attribute and Activities enabled.

To have the activities associated with Event show up on the Account view, we go ahead and edit the account-event relationship.

Let us edit the edit the new_account_new_event_customer relationship.

You need to change the Relationship behaviour to Parental, so that the Rollup View picklist is enabled for editing. Choose “Cascade All” in Rollup View and Publish the customization.

Prior to this change the activities associated with Event1 did not show up on account.

After the change, we see them as shown in the first screenshot above.

Does it work with other entities?

I wanted to check if the roll-up works for showing up all activities for custom entities. In this example if you see I have a lookup for Parent Event on the Event entity. Each event can have its own set of activities, however if I wanted to check all activities associated with the Event and its child events on the Parent event, that rollup is still locked.

How do I read programmatically?

Rollup Request

With the Rollup view set to Cascade All, this request will return all the activities as is seen on the form in CRM.

Conclusion:

We have one problem solved with the Rollup View now available for configuration. Hopefully soon we should have this flag enabled for hierarchy entities where we would want a rollup of activities to the parent.

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