Core Blog

Introduction to Advanced Find - Part 2

Written by Matthew Duhig | Apr 20, 2017 2:31:00 PM

In the first part of our blog, we discussed and demonstrated the power of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Advanced Find and how it can be used for basic filtering.

In part two, we will be using Advanced Find to search for information on related entity records (i.e. an organisation and an associated opportunity record) and exploring the "Under" and "Not Under" operators.

In our first example, we will build an Advanced Find query that searches our database for all Active Organisations located in Oxford, with an Opportunity created within the last six months (Figure i and Figure ii).

Figure i

Now that we have built the filter criteria using fields on the organisation entity, we want to add additional criteria so that the query finds organisations with at least one opportunity created within the last 6 months. To do this, you will need to scroll down to the Related section after clicking Select. Make your query look like the one below.

Figure ii

After building this query, we will make the results show 3 Columns (attributes): Organisation Name, Address: City and Status Reason (Figure iii).​

Figure iii

In our second example, we will build an advanced find query that uses the "under" and "not under" operators.

  • "Under" - finds all records below a specific hierarchy level (e.g. branches under a specific organisation record)
  • "Not Under" – opposite to the above

In this example, we will use the "under" operator to find all branches (subsidiaries) who are placed under the Core Technology Group hierarchy – as shown using the CRM hierarchy chart below:

When we look at the setup of the hierarchy structure using the organisation chart, we can see it spans 3 hierarchical levels and only involves a small number of records - easy enough to interpret on a single screen but imagine if hundreds of records were included in your hierarchy across various organisations.

To easily review this information, we can build an advanced find to list all the organisations who are placed below Core Technology Group.

On clicking Results the following records are shown:

CRM has confirmed 5 organisations (branches) sit under Core Technology Group.

Selecting "Not Under" gives an inverted result so in this example it this would find all organisation records excluding the 5 sub-ordinate organisations above.

If you would like to find out any more information on the above or would like to speak to one of our consultants you can contact us here.