If you have been staying up-to-date on the latest and greatest with Dynamics 365 and Dataverse, one of the new features you might have noticed that is in preview is multi-table lookups.
This feature was previously limited to the account and contact tables.
There have been workarounds in the past such as enabling connections (yuck), creating a middle table or going as far as creating a lookup field for each table that you need to relate to your main record. You can just imagine what your form and views look like when you have one out of X number of lookups populated with the data.
As of writing this, you either need to write custom code via the SDK to use this type of field or chat with the creators of the XRMToolBox, who have now created a solution called Polymorphic Lookup Creator to replace their original solution. This new solution will allow you to build the multi-table lookup and use it within Dataverse.
How could you utilize this feature? That’s a great question! One issue customers constantly run into occurs during lead capture. Someone fills out a “contact us” or “request more information” form on your website. Depending on what solution you are using, most customers have a lead record created automatically and use duplicate detection to prevent a duplicate lead from being created.
Instead of creating a lead directly, you could build a holding table that would store this information. When a record is created, you could use Power Automate to search for existing records in the system based on the email address. If you do find one, instead of having multiple lookup fields for contact, account and lead, you could have one multi-table lookup field available to kick off your processes.
If simply requesting information doesn’t qualify as a lead, maybe you prefer to send the owner of the contact an email to reach out to the prospect directly with the information requested without creating a new lead. By storing the info instead of automatically creating a lead, you can choose which route to take for any given form fill. This will keep your data clean as well as give you true numbers on how many true prospects or leads are generated from your website.
