Finding all activities for a particular entity type

I am in the process of migrating one of my customers from Dynamics CRM 2011 to Dynamics CRM 2015. While moving to the new environment, I am also moving their forms to the new form model.

While working on the Contract form, I noticed that every record that I reviewed had no activities associated with it. (they mostly regard the activities to the actual Account or Contact.

Since there are seldom any activities associated with a Contract, I was thinking that maybe I could remove the Activities/Notes pane from the middle of the form.

It takes up a lot of room and is pretty useless.

BUT, I really needed to know if this would cause any issues later, should they start regarding activities to the contracts.

I thought about it for a few minutes and decided to perform some experiments with Advanced Find.  I was quite pleased with my results.

It turns out that you can indeed locate the activities associated with a specific type of Entity.  You just need to construct your Advanced Find like this:

image

Here is how I created this:

1. Navigate to Activities

2. Select the All Activities view.

3. Add a search for the Regarding Entity that matches your quest. In my case, I was looking for Contracts (as you can see above).

4. Select the field that is the same name as the Regarding Entity type.

5. Change the selection criteria to Contains Data.

6. Click the Results button on the Ribbon.

 

This should show you any activity related to the specific type of Regarding Entity type.

The way this appears to work to me is in the selection of the field that Contains Data. The field on an entity, that is the same name as the entity, is actually the record ID. 

So in essence, we are searching for any activity whose record ID, for that type of entity, is not blank.

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