Options Sets or Custom Entity? Should you have a look up field or a pick list? Is there really any difference? What ones right and what’s wrong?
In essence both will allow you to do the same thing, choose items from a ‘list’ rather than have people write free text in a field the result being cleaner data that you can analyse.
Personally I am a fan of custom entities and there are a few reasons for this;
1. You have the flexibility of change without relying on a System Admin
- The benefit of this is it reduces the strain on System Admins being reliant to add / remove items from an Option Set
- With security roles you can allow all users to view and use items in the entity but only ‘super users’ being to add to the list and can prevent everyone from deleting
- You can even add items when ‘on the road’ and using an app
2. Cleaner historic records if an items is no longer needed
- If an item is no longer needed you can simply deactivate it with historical information being preserved
- Cleaner and easier than changing an Option set item. If you delete an item from an option set it is gone, if you change the name to do not use xxxx you don’t actually prevent people from using it
3. Quickly See related items without the need for advanced finds
- Its a brilliant quick way to find items without having to rely on every user of your CRM spelling items the same so you can utilise and Advanced Find
- With the use of a grid in the custom entity you can see all the related items below
- I like using Country, County and Town / City as custom entities with them all joined
- I can go in a Country record and see all the counties and towns below it and also all the Accounts, Contacts and any other entity that has a look up for the Country
- Go into a Town and again see all the Accounts and Contacts.
At the end of the day this is just my opinion and there is no right or wrong way. There are a lot of factors involved to allow you to make your decision including licences, the time to make security roles to support it, data cleaning of existing records and your user base.
If you like the concept of how the Country / County / Town lookups work please feel free to contact me information@bristow.onmicrosoft.com
£250 Package
- Country, County and Town / City entities created
- Over 3,000 Country, County, Town / City records loaded to get your started
- Fields put into Accounts and Contacts and the existing fields made Read only
- Views created for you to do your data cleaning
- Workflow Created so that when you select the Town / City it will automatically populate the County and Country
£300 Package
- Country, County and Town / City entities created
- Over 3,000 Country, County, Town / City records loaded to get your started
- Fields put into Accounts and Contacts and 2 other entities and the existing fields made Read only
- Views created for you to do your data cleaning
- Workflow Created so that when you select the Town / City it will automatically populate the County and Country
Data cleaning can be done charged at a fixed price of £0.20 per record
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