In this video, we will discuss what entities
are, why you would use them, and how to create them.
We will use a pet grooming salon to illustrate
concepts in this video.
For this business, we need information about
pet owners, appointments, animals, and so on.
In Dynamics 365, these different buckets of
information are stored in entities.
An entity is a table of information.
For example, for the grooming salon, we will
use the built-in Contact entity to keep track of pet owners.
Each row in the table represents a record
in the entity, and each column represents
a field in each of those records.
In this example, the fields are First Name,
Last Name, Email, and Phone.
Dynamics 365 comes with most of the entities
you need already built-in, including things
like appointments, contacts, and invoices.
But sometimes you may need to create a custom
entity.
For the grooming salon example, we will need
to create an entity that contains data about
each of the animals, such as name, species,
or breed.
There are two types of entities in Dynamics
365: Activity entities and Non-activity entities.
An activity is a special kind of entity.
Think of an activity as an action you can
attach to a record.
For the grooming salon, we will create a non-activity
entity named Animal.
Let’s see how this looks in action.
Open the main menu.
Click Settings, and then Customizations.
Next, click Customize the System.
Click Entities, then New.
In Display Name, enter a singular noun that
describes the entity.
In Plural Name, enter the plural form of the
same noun.
The Name for this entity will be created automatically
based on the Display Name you provided.
If you want an image or icon for the records
in your entity, say the picture of each animal
that comes into the salon, create the entity
first, and then add an Image field later.
You can come back here afterwards, and the
image field will be listed in the drop-down
so you can add the image.
When you create an entity, you have to assign
Ownership of it to a User or Team, or to an Organization.
If a particular person or team will be responsible
for maintaining the records, as in this case,
or if you are creating an activity entity,
set the ownership to User or Team.
We will leave the Define as an activity entity
checkbox empty in this case.
Next, provide a description for the entity.
Under Areas that display this entity, check
the appropriate boxes so users can access
this information in all the right places.
Since the Animal entity is directly related
to contacts, we will want this information
to be available to Sales and Service roles.
Now select the options you want.
If you are not sure whether you want to enable
an option, don’t select it.
You can always select it later.
Notice that there are several options with
a plus sign next to them.
These options cannot be turned off after they
have been enabled.
Click Save and Close.
To make your changes visible to others, click
Publish All Customizations.
Before other people can see your changes,
you will also need to edit Security Roles
and grant access to the appropriate teams
and users.
For more information about creating entities
and setting up security roles, please search
for creating entities at this website.
