create custom product entity

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Posted on by Community Member Microsoft Employee

how can I create a custom entity that functions similar to products?

I need to be able to include a list of potential products offered in an opportunity. I want to track 2 properties of a potential products: brand and product type. I also need to include an estimated $ amount for each potential product in that opportunity.

If I make a custom entity, will each product I add to an opportunity have to be unique? Since sales people will enter the estimated $ amount associated to each opportunity. Is estimated $ amount a field property of the unique product or is there a way I can populate a field in opportunity that can be associated to my new product entity?

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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: create custom product entity

Instead of creating a new product entity, I ended up doing this as my solution community.dynamics.com/.../211457
Inogic 402 on at

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RE: create custom product entity

Hi Cynthia,

Creating custom entity like Product would be an humongous task, as there are lot many dependent functionalities on Product entity like Price List, Product Properties, etc. which would be very difficult to replicate.

If in case your reason behind creating a new entity like Product is the additional non-essential features that are not required by you, then you can customize the existing Product entity to curtail down onto the features.

In order to have specific products to be available on Opportunity, you can create multiple pricelists wherein only those products that you want should be included in the pricelist. When, you select a pricelist on opportunity, only the products that are pricelist items would be available for selection on Opportunity Product. This way you would be able to achieve what you need.

HTH!

Thanks,
Sam
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: create custom product entity

That sounds very complicated.

When we didn't have the itemized breakdown requirement, I was only going to use a few fields to capture the 1 major product offered in the opportunity. Is there a way to track multiple offerings with fields and option sets?

I had a brand field, product field, and estimated $ amount field. But that was only if I had one product offered. Once I have more than 1 product, my advanced find filters grow a lot due to possible combinations and I won't be able to graph the relationship properly.

Our sales people know if Brand A only offers Product 1 & 2 and not 3 & 4, so creating a restriction like that might not be required. Although it is a source of human error.
Wayne Walton 13,726 on at

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RE: create custom product entity

The problem, what you're trying to capture isn't simple, from a structure perspective. You have a lot of conditions there, which means building a structure that's flexible enough to handle all of those.

Generally that's the opposite of simple.

But you could still take the concept of a line-item approach. Build a Brand entity, build a Product entity, then built an Opportunity Product entity that uses lookups to Brand and Product, and then has dollar values and quantity. Then make a calculated field to multiply quantity and value.

without any fancy filtering, salespeople could technically select the wrong brand and product, but it would technically work. Then you could start building JavaScript that filter the Product lookup based on the Brand chosen. I say JavaScript, because I don't think you could do the kind of conditional relationships between Brands and Products in a simple Filtered Lookup. If you could say that Brand A only had Products 1 and 2, and Brand B only has Products 3 and 4, you could do a simple filtered lookup. But the moment Brands A and B can technically have the same product, you're into custom code land.
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: create custom product entity

The products entity OOB is quite detailed for my purposes. Here's another post I made, I just want an itemized breakdown of my estimated opportunity amounts. So management can see a breakdown by brand or product type.

community.dynamics.com/.../211457

Is there a simpler method to capture this information?

Thanks
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Wayne Walton 13,726 on at

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RE: create custom product entity

So products are actually made from an array of entities, not just a single Entity.

There is the root product itself, which is all the factual data about the product as a single item. There is the Opportunity Product which is the line-item containing a reference to the root product, quantity, and other details unique to the opportunity (there is also one of those for Quotes and another for Orders, but I think that is not relevant here). Then behind the scenes you have your quantity types, your price lists, and your price list line-items.

So at minimum you would need the Product list and then your Opportunity Product to link back to your list of Products but handle unique things like Quantity.

So my question is "can you do what you want without recreating a part of CRM that is hard to recreate?" A simplified Product concept can work if you really do need them split out, but I would seriously look at whether or not you need all of that.

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