Dynamics 365 Dataverse : Customer Type Field

What is?

This field it's provisioned along with some of the traditional Dynamics 365 licenses (sales, customer service) and it's a specialized type of lookup field designed specifically for establish a relationship between records in different entities ("linking records") to account or contact entities, often used in the Opportunity entity.

When adding new table columns based on this field type two new relationships are added to the entity making it the interesting part of this field.

When end users uses this field they will have the choice to link only to one account or contact and they can search trough both entity records or filter only for one of them.

Trick 1: Roll-up tasks around accounts or contacts

Opportunities, Invoices, Orders, and Cases have the "Customer" field type included out of the box and that allows any task linked to one of these record types and using the "Regarding" field to be visible from the contact or account forms under activities.

On top of this we can also add the same functionality to custom entities and have tasks around a custom order or invoice records!

Trick 2: Using the Customer field for developers

Using the fetch xml with the opportunity entity, where we have a field called Customer (new_customer):

Using the XRM.WebApi to update the customer column in the opportunity entity, where we have a field called Customer (new_customer):

That calls an HTTP PATCH over https://operations-elcaniederhorn.crm4.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.0/opportunities(3cbbd39d-d3f0-ea11-a815-000d3a33f3c3)

with the payload: {"[email protected]":"/account(27c95fa8-8375-ed11-81ab-6045bd8c5759)"} and the same principle can be also used under a Power Automate flow.