Creating a Progress Bar Inside a Grid Column in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operation

In one of my customizations, I needed to display a progress bar directly inside a grid column. Since D365FO doesn't provide a native progress bar control for grid cells, I created a lightweight solution using a display method and Unicode characters.

Creating the Progress Bar

- Calculate the completion percentage.
- Convert the percentage into a fixed number of blocks.
- Display filled and empty Unicode characters to represent the progress.
- Append the numeric percentage for better readability.

[SysClientCacheDataMethodAttribute(true)] // Optimizes grid performance
public display str progressBarField()
{
str progressBar = "";
int percentage;
int filledBlocks;
int emptyBlocks;
int totalBlocks = 10;
RandomGenerate randomGenerate = RandomGenerate::construct();

percentage = randomGenerate.randomInt(0,100);

filledBlocks = real2int(round((percentage / 100) * totalBlocks, 1));
emptyBlocks = totalBlocks - filledBlocks;

// Unicode characters:
// █ (U+2588) - Filled block
// ░ (U+2591) - Empty block
progressBar = strRep("█", filledBlocks) + strRep("░", emptyBlocks);

// Append text percentage for readability
return progressBar + " " + int2Str(real2int(percentage)) + "%";
}

Improving the Visual Appearance
To make the progress bar stand out even more, I also customized the field's appearance by changing its background and text colors using the displayOption() method. 

 

[DataSource]
class ExceptionLog
{
public void displayOption(Common _record, FormRowDisplayOption _option)
{
       //red color
_option.backColor(WinAPI::RGB2int(170, 26, 44));

//white color
_option.textColor(WinAPI::RGB2int(255, 255, 255));

FormControlId BarControlId = this.formRun().controlId(formControlStr(ExceptionLog, ProgressBar));
_option.affectedElementsByControl(BarControlId);

super(_record, _option);
}
}
 

This allows the progress bar field to have a custom background color (red in this example) and white text, making it much more noticeable within the grid. 

Limitation