Using Hierarchies in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Microsoft has added some very much needed functionality to Dynamics CRM 2015. One feature in particular is the Hierarchy Visualizations. I will be adding to this post over the coming weeks to provide you with a real world look into hierarchies and how to use them in every day life as a user and as a CRM administrator. First off, let’s look at what Hierarchy Visualizations allow us to do:

1. Group and categorize products making product management an easier task
   • By doing this, users can now find products (and services) by seeing the family or bundle the product is in
2. Create a ‘tree structure’ of your products.
   • With a Family at the top of the tree structure you can create associated product bundles and child products
     • Create a family within a family – Other families can be below the main family which means that you can create as many nested product families as you wish.

Now let’s take a look at the limitations of the Hierarchy Visualizations.

1. Hierarchies are only available to the 1:N relationships AND you can not reference another entity. This means the 1:N relationship has to reference the same entity as a self-referencing parent-child relationship. The easiest way to understand this is to think about the Account entity. The Out Of the Box (OOB) Dynamics CRM 2015 instance comes with the Account entity already set up with a link to itself for a parent account. This 1:N relationship is set up as the hierarchy.
2. You can only have 1 hierarchy relationship per entity
3. When you view the hierarchy, you are limited to a maximum of 4 fields are displayed on a tile
4. When viewing the hierarchy tree, you are limited on the number of tiles that can be seen on the screen. If you reduce the Zoom on your browser however, you can access more tiles.

 

Now let’s take a look at the two ways to open the hierarchy visualization tiles.

1. When you are looking at a view for an entity that has hierarchies enabled, you will notice that there is a new column on the left in the view that looks like a pyramid. This hierarchy icon will be displayed if the underlying record is part of a hierarchy. You can click on the hierarchy icon and the hierarchy visualization will open.
2. When you are viewing an entity record that has hierarchies enabled and the record is part of a hierarchy, you will notice the hierarchy icon in the upper right hand corner of the record. You can click on the hierarchy icon and the hierarchy visualization will open.
   

I’ll be creating some posts on the new Product Family capabilities, this combined with the hierarchy feature has made the product catalog capabilities much more compelling.

– Duane Napier