Lookup Controls in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016

In this article we are going to discuss different types of lookup controls in Dynamics CRM 2016 and their uses. Before jumping in to this discussion let’s first understand what is lookup control??

Lookup is a special input type control which allows us to select value from an existing list. In Dynamics CRM, lookup represent an association with entity, it can be the same entity for example parent account in account entity or a different entity for example primary contact lookup on account entity.

Types of Lookup Control

Following are the different types of lookup controls in Dynamics CRM.

Standard Lookup Control

This lookup control represent a single association with current or another entity. We can create this type of lookup control using lookup data type.
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Where we can select target entity type, let’s account and it will show us list of the existing account record while entering data for this field.
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We can also create a 1:N relationship to get lookup control on N side of the entity for example if we have two entity A and B and we want to have lookup on entity B for entity A, we need to setup 1:N relationship between A and B.

Customer Lookup

This lookup type controls allows us to select customer entities records (Account and Contact). We can get this lookup now in CRM 2016 with the help of customer data type. In earlier version there was no way to create custom customer type lookup.
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You can refer our earlier article for customer data type.

Party List

This is a special type of lookup control which represent association with multiple entities. There is no supported way of creating a party list lookup control in CRM at present. Common example of party list attributes are regardingobjectid, from and to fields in activity entities.
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We can’t create custom party list but as a workaround we can create custom activity type entity, which will give us many party list attributes and we can reuse them for our requirement.

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