Dynamics 365 Hierarchies

Dynamics 365 has functionality for hierarchies. This is useful when you have records that fall into a parent-child scenario, such as accounts and parent accounts. We will go through setting up these hierarchies in Dynamics 365.

If you navigate to an entity such as the Account entity, you will see a Hierarchy Settings section. This displays the hierarchy if one has been set up:

Editing the Account Hierarchy, we see the hierarchy relationship is shown as Parent Account (account_parent_account):

You can see also there is a quick view form that will be used in the visualization.

This relationship is known as a self referencing relationship, in that it references itself, the same entity. You can see in the 1:N Relationships for Account below, there is the account_parent_account relationship:

If we take a look at this, we can see the parent entity and related entity are both Account. Also note the Hierarchical field is set to Yes:

If you wanted to have a hierarchical structure on another entity where this is not enabled, you will need to set up a self referential relationship.

Now, when we select an Account, you can see there is a Parent Account field on the form. We can set the value of the field to another account, e.g. A Datum, below:

When we go to our accounts view now, you can see there is a hierarchy icon next to both account records:

Zooming over the icon, the prompt is to view the hierarchy of the record:

Clicking on the icon displays the records in the hierarchy view, using the quick view form:

There are also some additional quick view forms from the ellipse:

If you want to enable hierarchies on other entities, including custom entities, go through the steps above.

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Carl de Souza Enterprise Architect at Microsoft · AI Technology Expert