This post is one of a series I am creating aimed at helping people prepare for the MB2-712 certification. (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Customization and Configuration)

In this post I am going to look at fields. A subject which hopefully follows on nicely from my last post about entities. As after you have created an entity logically the next thing you’d want to do is create the fields which makeup the entity.

Fields Overview

Fields are sometimes described as attributes by developers, therefore the two terms are interchangeable.

• Fields are used to store values of defined types. (For example a piece of text or a date.)
• Sometimes fields of the same type can have different formats. (For example, a text field can be optionally formatted as an email address, URL, phone number etc.)
• Fields appear as controls on forms. (Such as a text box, date picker, radio buttons etc.)
• Fields can also be shown in user and system views and can be used as part of queries. (Advanced Finds.)
• For each field a column is created in the SQL table for the entity.
• Fields can be “simple” or calculated.
• Fields can be created that contain rolled up values from related entities.

As discussed already we have system and custom entities. The system entities will already comprise of many out of the box fields but we can add more custom fields as required. Although it is always a good idea to check a suitable system field doesn’t already exist before creating a custom one.

When a custom entity is first created some field will get created by default. Including things like the primary field, created on, created by, owner and many more. I doubt you will need to know exactly what these fields are but even so it is worth creating a custom entity and before adding your own custom fields have a look. Below you can see that I have done just that. With a user / team owned entity I have 19 fields before I start adding any custom ones. Notice that only two are prefixed new_. I have used the default publisher which adds new_ to all custom fields. The two fields that are created are name (the primary field for this entity) and id. (Which holds the GUID which is the primary key.)

Field Types

The table below lists the standard field types available in CRM 2016.

Note:
The field type of customer has been added at CRM 2016 Update 1. This is a special type that allows a lookup field to be created that can be either a contact or an account. Being new it is unlikely to be covered in the MB2-712 exam. (yet.) But you should ideally still be aware of this additional data type and how it operates.

Creating / Maintaining Fields

When we create a field the screen looks like this;

The table below covers the detail of each field, as always I strongly recommend you experiment with creating different types of fields;

I have covered a lot of detail in these revision notes! Taking time to get some hands on experience of creating fields is really important.

Despite covering a lot of detail about field there is more to come! In future posts I will expand on the details here to cover calculated fields, rolled up field, option sets etc etc.

I hope this post will have helped anyone preparing for the MB2-712 certification.
J