Pitfall in bulk edit

Bulk edit is a very useful mechanism in Dynamics CRM/365 platform. This simply the ability of modifying more than one value at once. Anyway, there is a hidden pitfall where many users face issues. In this article I am simply trying to illustrate this as below;

For example I am trying to update below 5 records. So I am selecting them and clicking edit.

So I get below form with relevant fields. Suppose I only need to update Business Phone. So I only have to input new value and save. Please notice, we don't see any value for other fields.

Now I see our new value has been updated in all 5 records which is the expected out come. Pretty cool.

Now try to do the same operation (select all the records and click edit). This time I am populating Account Name lookup field. Then I change my mind and remove that value.

Once remove we can only see Business Phone field with our new values.

Once save, you will notice all the Company Name fields have been vanished !

Obviously, this is not a good user experience. Please make sure you understand this behavior before jump into Bulk Edit feature. If you are a trainer, please make sure you educate your audience with this tricky behavior. Hopefully, Microsoft will fix this in a coming release. Until then, play safe!

Identify Create Form and Update Form in Business Rules

It is recommended to use Business Rules to replace the functionalities of JavaScript. Yet, BRs got a lot of limitations, but it can be used for some of the most used aspects like controlling the UI of forms.

Anyway, one of the cool things we did using JS is controlling field visibility and business required levels based on Create Form and Update Form. There is a simple way of achieving the same with BR.

What we do here is checking the CreateOn date. Obviously, we don’t have a value in this field till save the record. Below simple condition shows how the Description field is hidden for Create Form and showing for Update Form.

Caution
Anyway, there is one trick here. Business Rule will only work if CreateOn field is present in the form. What we need to do is, just get the CreateOn into form, but set Visible by Default = No to hide it.