Show Lookup as Dropdown in Dynamics 365 Portals–Gotchas!

I have been working and providing training a lot recently on Dynamics 365 portals. And whenever I go over Metadata configuration of entity form the option – “Render Lookup as Dropdown” option excites the participants a lot.

Well, in this article I am not going to show how you can render a lookup as dropdown. Rather I would like to highlight what features you loose when you render your lookup as dropdown.

Gotcha 1 – No Values shown in DropDown

When you render your lookup as dropdown, the first thing you observe that the list is empty. Well, this may happen because there is a bit of change in this implementation. Right now the options will only show up is you enable entity permission for the entity which is shown as lookup.

For example – Primary Contact field on the account form. When you render your Primary Contact as dropdown in Portals, you need to have an entity permission for contact entity with Append privilege for the webrole the user is logged in with. The contacts will show up then.

Gotcha 1 – Lookup filtering not working.

Well this is something undesirable but as of the day I am writing this blog, related records filtering does not work for lookups rendered as dropdown.

Short article but should put you in good stead next time your customer asks for this option.

Debajit Dutta

(Dynamics MVP)

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