Friday, November 29, 2013

A Codeless Rollup Field

I owe this tip to my fellow CRM partner-in-crime, Oakton Canberran Julie Stedman who discovered it on a project we are working on. It works for both CRM 2011 and CRM 2013.

The Problem

Often a client asks to roll up the number of child records to a parent record or, perhaps, roll them up and split them by status. An example may be enrolments for a course. On the course record we want to see the number of enrolments and whether the attendees have paid.

Traditionally, we add a field to the parent record and use a plugin to query CRM to populate the value in the field. However, there is another way.

The Solution

A little-known property of adding a sub-grid to a form is the ability to only show a chart instead. This means we can add a bar chart or pie chart to a record showing totals for the child records. Scroll down to the bottom on the sub-grid properties for the magic tickbox to ‘Show Chart Only’.

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That is it. With this ticked, instead of a grid showing, you see a chart which represents whatever related data you desire. Here is an example where I have added the chart to a Case record to summarise the associated activities.

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The only drawback with this is you cannot drill down into the chart but, for rollup totals, this is probably not the end of the world.

Conclusions

For a quick and elegant way to show rollup totals of child records on a parent record, consider this trick. You still have the power to configure the look and feel of the chart(s) and you avoid adding a bunch of fields and populating them via plugins which can be time-consuming and, therefore expensive.

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