Filtering on Lookups in Triggers, Journey Branches and Email Content in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys

I think I’m pretty clued up on Customer Insights - Journeys, and sometimes I’m not as smart as I think. It turns out I’ve been using the filters in Journey Triggers/Branches and Email Content all along. I’m pretty sure it’s not just me, right?

This filtering control shows up in lots of places in CI-J. I’ve always assumed it was not possible to filter on a lookup value, and instead I’ve been filter on the name of the lookup and feverishly hoping someone doesn’t change the name, and that I don’t spell it wrong.

On the left is what previous Amey did, on the right is what I learnt last week. (I guess that’s the ‘New year, new me.’ item checked off the list for the year!)

Some of the out of the box triggers such as ‘Event Registration Created’ and ‘Marketing Form Submitted’ have this super handy condition section when you create a new journey with a trigger. So even previous Amey could manage this one.

A very helpful Journey creation UI experience for some triggers

How do you do this wizardry?

If you don’t add the filter on the journey create page, you are left to fend for yourself on the journey canvas to build your own filter condition. The secret is to navigate to the table you want to filter by lookup, then click the blue link at the top ‘Condition on …Table Name’ to use the lookup reference as a filter. It looks pretty obvious once you know it is there but I never thought to click on this before.

Filtering on an event in a journey trigger

And of course, you may want to use a different trigger or a custom one which deosn’t have the helpful UI on the create page too.

Filtering a trigger by the lead owner

It works on journey branching too!

Branching a journey for a specific Account record

Filtering on the Account lookup rather than Name

So erm yeah, go forth and filter better than previous Amey ever has!

Ps. if you have been doing it right all along then I’m really happy for you but please think twice before commenting to tell me that as a means to bring others down (unless your name is Megan V Walker, then you can do what you want 😉)