Jan 29, 2020

Issue - Disable viewing of recently used items from Lookup

Within many user friendly features introduced in Dynamics 365, is lookup fields of Forms are shown recently worked items while attempting to fill it. This is really a nice feature that help users. Suppose we have a Contact lookup, so we will be shown recently used Contacts beside the field.

Some times we may be designing the system where Contact lookup is to be filled with a Contact of a specific type. Suppose, we use Contact entity to keep both Students and Lecturers of a University. Obviously, Student lookup should not be filled with a Lecturer. In such situations we usually force our look-up to stick in to a specific View. (say. All Active Students View) that filtered to shown only the type we are interested in. Still we have to be careful since recently used records shown, would contain All kinds of Contact.

If your look-up is a filtered one, make sure you disable the feature of showing recently used records. Below illustrates how to do this in field level.


This solves our problem.

Hmm... yet, if we use Business Process Flow in same form, we got an issue. You will notice this Disabling of showing recently used items is not working for the same field in BPF.

Illustration 1 - Click magnifying glass icon of the Lookup field - Shows the correct filtered values.


Illustration 2 - Click the rest of the space of the look-up field - Shows ALL the recently used records.


This is misleading and user may end-up filling a Lecturer in Student field.

I have recently raised a support ticket for this on-behalf of one of my clients. Anyway, MS is aware of this and confirmed its By Design as per now. If more people raised their concern on this, we can expect this to be fixed in a future release. Till then, play safe. Either train the users accordingly OR implement a client-side validation.

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