In this blog post, I will explain how you can add control to your out of box fields. Most of the time, consultants create new fields if they wanted to use any control on the field. Well its not ideal but it helps to achieve your goal. Today, we are gonna see how we will be able to add controls on the out of box fields.
For demonstration purpose, I will be adding control to the country field on Accounts entity. Before we proceed you would need list of countries in an excel sheet to import them to the targeted environment. You can find list of countries, from here.
Following steps will help you to import the list to Dynamics 365, Common Data Services (CDS).
1. Create an entity named "Country" into CDS:
2. Open entity, click on Get data -> Get data from Excel:
3. Upload the excel file with list of countries:
4. Click on Map Data fields, and map the Country Name (Primary field).
5. Click on Save, and then click on Import Data.
6. After few minutes, you will see import successful message, and 195 countries should be imported:
Note: Above is the new method using Power Apps, you can also use traditional data import wizard to import data. In upcoming blog post, I will also be mentioning about how to import data using flow.
Following steps will help you to add control to the Account main form:
1. Open the Account Main form using classic editor.
2. If you have Address1_composite, the remove that and add all the address 1 fields (address1_line1, address1_line2,....address1_country):
3. Open properties of Address 1: Country field, and open controls tab:
4. Click on Add Control, select Auto-Complete, and click on Add:
5. Select view as Source, and the click on edit button on View.
6. Select Countries as entity and Active countries as view:
7. Edit the field and select Country Name:
8. Change the controls from Text box to Auto-Complete:
9. Save and close the form, and publish all customizations.
Finally, you are done and good to go:
Test the form from any model driven app where the form is present:
I hope this helps. As always please let me know if you have any questions/concerns, I am always happy to help the community.
Thanks
Jay