Lets take a look at some more unified interface features that we can leverage using custom controls in our model-driven apps. This time were going to look at some things we can do with sub-grids and views. I have focused the steps in the post in the classic designer as its much more consistent behaviour for custom controls, some are available in the new design studio but for ease of demonstration I default to classic of this kind of thing (for now). This post is going to focus on custom controls which are available natively as there is already a wealth of functionality there and ‘out of the box first’ rules always apply. A future post will look to Power Apps Component Framework for some exploration off-the-grid.

Custom Controls

• Editable grids

• Nested grids

• Reference panels

Remember with any view you can have it as one which the user selects themselves or navigate directly to it using via the sitemap - check step 2 & 3 here [1] to do that.

Editable Grids

So editable grids have been around for a good few years but in my experience they are not so widely used or known about. They are also a bit tricky to set up if you haven’t done it before, or if you forget about the pesky settings every time you try (this is me). You go to your view you want the editable grid on but you cant find it as an option, convince yourself its a feature not available in your tenant, try a million other tenants, still cant find it then finally read the Microsoft Docs [2] instructions (who does that!?) properly.

Key steps and features

This is where I always get caught out - you cannot control which individual views are editable, nor which ones default to editable. It is controlled at entity level for views and form level for subgrids. But until you enable editable grids on the entity you cannot add them on to your form subgrids.

Nested grid view & Hide nested grid column header settings are covered in the next section.

Remember: you can apply read only business rules to the editable grids, BUT you need to make sure you 1) set the business rule scope to ‘entity’ and 2) that all the fields included in the business rule are shown on the view. Lots more handy tips around these nuances in the Microsoft Docs too [2]

Nested Grids

This one is an absolute beauty and also for some reason - very well hidden and therefore very under used! Full credits to Dian Taylor for uncovering this one in her blog post from October last year [3]. There are so so so many use cases for this one it pains me that its so sneakily erm nested behind the facade of the editable grid. Like editable grids, nested grids can be used at either entity or subgrid level. A nested grid is an extension of an editable grid so make sure you are clued up on the section above first.

For this example each round has many Q & A (these are the questions and answers that power the quiz machine). Now we can see each round and its questions in one single place - magical! An of course you can use these on views and also on subgrids on your forms.

Reference Panels

I discovered this little gem a few years ago too with a candidly titled blog called “What the heck is a reference panel!?“ [4] by Alex Shelga. Its a magical way to get lots of subgrids on a single page with tabular navigation - super handy for core entities such as Account and Contact which have lots of related record sets.

That wraps up the custom controls option for grids with model-driven apps. Next time we will look at what we can find in PCF gallery to take the grid magic to a whole new level. Do you know of any other hidden grid controls? I would love to know, let me know in the comments below!

[1] Navigate to view on sitemap navigation https://www.ameyholden.com/articles/activity-calendars-in-model-driven-apps

[2] Editable grids documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/customize/make-grids-lists-editable-custom-control?WT.mc_id=BA-MVP-5003692

[3] Nested grids blog post by Dian Taylor https://d365goddess.com/nested-grids-in-dynamics-365/

[4] What the heck is a reference panel!? by Alex Shelga https://www.itaintboring.com/dynamics-crm/what-the-heck-is-a-reference-panel/