Business Rules Enhancements In Dynamics 365

Business rules were initially released in Dynamics 2013 and afterwards we got improvements in these. If you are new to business rules, you can refer to our earlier article for business rules. Now, let’s discuss what is new in Dynamics 365 for business rules.

Completely New Designer

Dynamics 365 replaced business rule designer with a completely new look and feel. The new designer supports drag and drop feature. Now, we can add conditions and actions by dragging from Components tab.



It also contains a new toolbar in designer itself, which can be used to add/remove the business rules actions and conditions. We can also reuse actions and condition now, using the copy and paste button. This toolbar also contains a snapshot button, which is very helpful, if you are preparing a technical design document and you want to use business rule screenshot in your document. It allows you to take a snapshot of the existing business rule actions and conditions.

 

The new VALIDATE button over command bar can be used to identify potential errors. We can validate our business rule with this button and it will show the notification, if there is any error in the business rule, as shown below.



The new components tab contains the condition and all the possible actions, which we can easily drag and drop into the designer area. Once the condition or action is placed, we can configure its property, using Properties tab.



Recommendation

A new action Recommendation is also added, which is very useful to provide suggestions and avoid the data entry errors. Let’s take an example of creating an account record, where we want to inform the user about the correct SIC code, which is based on the industry selected by the user. Let’s use the steps, mentioned below to use the recommended action.

1. Navigate to Settings->Customizations->Customize the System.
2. Select Business Rules under Components->Entities->Account.
3. Click on New button to setup new business rule.
4. Select default new condition and configure the properties, as shown below to check the industry type and click Apply button.
   
    
   
   
5. Now, drag recommendation action and drop it next to our condition.
   
   
   
   
6. Configure properties, as shown below and click Apply button.
   
    
   
   
7. Now, click Details and select Action to configure action properties, as shown below and click Apply.
   
    
   
   
8. Finally, save and activate our business rule.
   
   Now, when we will try to create an account with Account industry, we should get a recommendation, which is based on the business rule, as shown below.
   
   
   
   If we will click Apply button, it will set SIC code field value to 8721. Stay tuned for more Dynamics 365 new features.