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Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

To Custom Entity or Not

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Posted on by

Hi All,

Hope you're having a lovely day!

My organisation has several teams and projects each with different data fields that they want to collect against accounts (organisations) and contacts. Importantly, the structure of the organisation can change drastically based upon external funding, so teams and projects can be created or ceased meaning that the needs can change drastically.

Traditionally when they had additional fields they would add them to the Contacts entity or Accounts entity (a big no-no as it means those tables grow enormously). Aside from capturing this information outside the CRM, I've been wondering if there was a way to meet this need in the CRM. The best idea I have so far is developing custom entities specifically for the the team's needs that we can hide later on (using security settings) if the team changes or project ends. From my limited understanding, it should be possible to link the custom entity to a contact or account record using a connection so we can ensure that the information is linked to the account in some way (I'd imagine it would only need to be a one-to-one relationship in most cases).

I'm open to other ideas on how to address this need if anyone has any advice?

Thanks,

Andrew J.

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  • Verified answer
    Hari Narayanan Profile Picture
    589 on at
    RE: To Custom Entity or Not

    I would suggest to go with custom entity, unless you can re-use contact and account fields fully. Most of the projects which i have worked on use just account name and account address which would affect database size since both this entities have a lot of OOB fields. and as you mentioned drastic changes to the records and too many records are not a good option so any transaction must be kept in a seperate entity. you can relate the entities directly to account rather than a relationship (buit it entirely depends on your project specifications.

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