‘Saved views’ in D365 Human Resources

Hi all,

Welcome to my first article 😊

Today I want to update my hands-on experience on the feature I had waited for long and this is still in preview feature “Saved views”, which was released some 10 days back to D365 Human resources.

Challenges with personalisation

Personalisations and custom fields are two crucial out of box resources that will bring more optimization to the user experience and provides extensibility to record additional data in the system respectively. What if the HR wants these to be applicable for rest of the team too, then either we import the personalisation files (xml) to the required users or accommodate those in form of duty/privilege in a security role. Unfortunately, every personalisation cannot be accommodated to a security role. Some of the examples are label name changes, hiding some fields or tabs in a form, placing a custom field in a specific form etc. so far, we are (atleast am) importing the personalisations to other user accounts as and when required.

Gem of a solution with ‘Saved views’ feature

This is one of the cross-app features that has been released to D365 Finance and Operations sometime back and am waiting desperately for this feature to be released to D365 Human Resources (formerly Talent). Why am so desperate? well, for my customer:

Though we can import personalisation file to multiple users at once, we cannot import but if we have multiple personalisation files then it’s a problem. It’s not practical and productive to import these personalisations for the new employees joining the organization. I hope most of you will agree to this.

No more speeches, lets jump to the functionality directly 😊

The primary purposes of Saved feature are (there may be more, with my exploration so far):

1. We can create multiple versions of same form and at any time, we can switch over to the respective form
2. Publish all your personalisations to the security roles

Saving the forms into views

Note: This is a preview feature, you need to enable first.          

By default, whichever form you open, you see the default view called Standard view as shown below:

Standard view is:

1. Default out-of-box view for to all list pages as well as most of the full-page forms (refer above two screenshots)
2. No explicit personalisation is applied

Let’s take an example: I have created a custom field “Eligible for company car”. I will show you how you can save the view of a list page as well as a detailed full-page form and how can enable the same to all with a single shot action.

Navigate to Personnel management and open any worker record. Add the custom field in worker’s Profile > Worker summary section as shown below:

As you have modified the standard view by adding a custom field, you can save the view with a new name and to do that click a dropdown button next to standard view and enter a user-defined name to it as shown below:

I have given the name that has company’s name to it. You can give some meaningful name if you want to publish the view to all the HR users. If you want the HR team to open USMF view as default view rather than the standard view, you can enable Pin as default view to yes as shown above.

We have seen how to save a full-page form into a custom view. Now let’s see how you can define a custom view to a list page. Go to the workers list page, add this custom field to the list page grid and filter the list that has the value for the field Eligible for company car to Yes:

Now save the view to some meaningful name “Workers eligible for company car”:

I haven’t enabled the view as default one but when published to all HR users, they can switch between standard view and the custom view as shown below:

Publish the saved view to security roles

Let’s say, you want all the users, who have the security role Human resource assistant, should see both the views. Publishing can be done only by system administrator or the who have access to the form.

Navigate to system administration > Links > Setup > Personalisation. Go to Personal views. You can see the custom views that we have done earlier as shown below. If there are multiple views created by others too, you can identify through configuration owner, which is showing my name here.

You can copy the views to other users either by clicking on Publish or Copy to users. You can select multiple views and can copy to multiple users (which is a welcome feature, in case we are not going to publish to security role). Earlier, there is only an option of importing single personalisation file to multiple users. Now we can select multiple personalised views to multiple users at once.

For publish the view to a security role, we cannot select multiple personalised view unlike the above option. Now, select the view that you want to post to a security role and click on Publish button.

As shown above, add the security roles and click on Publish. If you want to restrict these views to a specific legal entity, then you can select the legal entity too before publishing.

Now, any user who has the roles Human resource assistant and human resource manager, can access both custom views.

Note: You may see a message “There may be a delay before “USMF view” is available to all users.” So, expect some delay in update of these custom views to the users who are associated to the security role. For me, it didn’t reflect immediately but also it didn’t take long time too.

One good thing here. Let’s say, if any of the user (who is associated to human resource assistant role) deletes all the personalisation, fortunately the custom views which are published, will still be existing as it is. Only the explicit personalisations done by the user will be gone.

Hope this helps you and it has surely eased most of my pain (my customer’s too) in terms of managing personalisation in future. I will keep you posted in case I find anything more about this feature and let me know if you find any other observations.

Happy lockdown and be safe!!