Understanding Entities

Add custom entities and modify business entities to match your evolving business needs. Make these changes directly from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM user interface. No programming is required.

To customize entities, you must have the System Administrator or System Customizer security role, or have equivalent privileges. More information: Permissions required for customization

Each entity has a number of fields. There are two types of fields:

More information: Work with Entities

Activity Entities

Activities are a special type of system entity. Create custom activity entities to support your communication needs, including instant messaging (IM) and text messaging (SMS). More information: Understanding Activity Entities

Editing Entities

For most business entities and all custom entities, you can modify the following:

Entity customization55306

More information

Create custom entities, or customize existing business entities, to structure and manage your data.

Understanding Activity Entities

Create or modify entity relationships so related records have lookup fields. These let people link them to other records.

Understanding Hierarchical Entity Relationships, Understanding Entity Relationships

Create or modify fields to capture specific types of data. After you create new fields, be sure to include them on the forms and views for the entity so that they are available from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM user interface.

Understanding Entity Fields, Mapping Entity Fields

Create or modify entity forms to see or input relevant data to the entity. You can specify which users or teams see a specific form by assigning security roles to the forms.

Create a or edit a form for an entity

Create or modify entity views to help people easily apply specific data filters to a group of entity records.

Work with Views

For a custom entity, select a symbol to use for the entity.

Update Icons

Saving and Publishing Customizations

If you make entity customizations that involve visual changes in the application, you must publish the entity after you save your changes to have the changes take effect.

If you make a change to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database structure, CRM applies the change immediately. Included with database structure changes are the creation or modification of entities, fields, or relationships.

Related Topics

Work with Entities

Export a solution

Translating Customized Entity and Field Text

Controlling Data Access

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