When creating a D365 Model Driven App, business requirements typically dictate views requirements for 80% of the user population, leaving the other 20% to be made up by personal views. While creating a personal view from a system view has been available for quite some time, it’s only been available through Advanced Find, which to some users can be extremely cumbersome and intimidating.
With the introduction of 2021 Wave 2 for Dynamics 365 (D365) & Power Platform, the ability to adjust system views, and even save them as personal views, has gotten much, much, easier.
How to add columns in Model Driven App
Start with a system view already included in the Model Driven App, and click on the Column Options button shown below:
The Edit Columns screen then displays where you can choose to Add columns:
When you click on Add columns, you’ll be presented with a list of all the columns for the table your view is based on—you can also change to see related tables and correlating columns. You can also search, and toggle between Default (all columns) and only custom columns:
To add a column, click on it, and it will disappear from the available column list. Once you have selected all the columns you would like added to your view, click Close at the bottom of the window. Now on the Edit columns screen, you can click on the ellipsis at the end of a column, and choose to remove it entirely, or move it up or down:
Once you have the columns in the order you want, click Apply at the bottom of the window.
In the example below, you can see I added the Address 1: ZIP/Postal Code column, moved it to a position right after Address 1: City, and moved the Root16 Industry column closer to the middle of the view:
You can change the sort order of the columns by clicking on the column headings, and multi-select column sort order by using the Shift key. Notice above the asterisks by the View name, indicating that the view has been altered. If you navigate away from this view, the changes made will not be retained (more on saving later).
How to change view filtering in D365 Model Driven App
In addition to being able to change the View columns, you can change the filtering by clicking on the Open advanced filtering panel button:
Here, you can add additional columns to filter on, from either the table the view is based on, or a related table. Once you add any additional filters, click Apply at the bottom of the window:
Saving custom views in Wave 2 for Dynamics 365
After you have customized the View with the right columns, sort order, and filtering, you’ll likely want to use this View again in the future, click on the ellipsis on the right side of the ribbon, the arrow next to Create View, then Save as new view.
A Save as new view dialog will appear, where you can choose a name for this new View:
The view you created now no longer has an asterisk, and is in the My Views section of the View selector:
D365 users can easily do this for themselves!
With this newly introduced feature, your users can more easily surface the missing 20% of views that don’t apply to the entire business, leaving administrators more time to address new or changing business requirements!