Modern Advanced Find in D365

As most of you are probably aware of by now, as part of 2022 Release Wave 1 Microsoft is replacing the legacy advanced find feature with a brand new upgraded version. This is very big news, since we’ve had the legacy advance find for a long time and it’s never really been upgraded! One of the questions that I heard from the community kept coming up as people heard about the new advanced find; “Is this going to be just as good as the legacy advanced find?” If you are interested in the answer to that question then I suggest you keep reading! I tested the new experience and will share what I found in this article.

Before you can start trying out the new experience, you’ll need to turn it on first. Keep in mind that the org needs to have datasearch enabled. If this is not the case, you won’t be able to use the modern advanced find experience. After you enabled the early access features of 2022 release wave 1 in your sandbox, you will need to open the environment in the power platform admin center first. From there you will need to navigate to settings and features under the product section. You’ll notice there are two settings that you can enable from here under the ‘Advanced find options’.

The first option is to turn on the modern (new) advanced find, and the second option is the ability to allow users to hide views. Wait what?! Yes, that’s right! Something we’ve never been able to do before, being able to hide (both personal and system) views from the view selector as a Dynamics 365 CE user! One thing to note is that once you turn on the new advanced find experience, you’ll notice that the legacy advanced find button on the top bar in Dynamics 365 now will be hidden.

Managing Views

When you navigate to any view in Dynamics 365 after the modern advanced find has been enabled, you’ll now be able to see very quickly which views are system views and which are personal views. The personal views will now have an icon next to it, marking them as personal views and the system views don’t have the icon.

There are several things you can do with personal views with this new experience. As I noticed above, a brand new feature is for users to hide personal and/or system views from the application so when they click on the view selector, the views will not show up. In order to set this up, users can click ‘Manage and share views’ from the bottom of the view as shown in the image above. This will open another side pane with options to:

• Show or hide a view
• Set a view as the default view
• Reset the default view or clear the default view that was selected previously
• Share personal views with other users or teams
• Edit properties of a personal view like the name and description of the view
• Assign a personal view to another user or team
• Delete a personal view: This will remove the view all together
• Deactivate a personal view: when a personal view is deactivated it will still show up here, you’ll see the inactive status next to the view name.

You can access these options by clicking on the tree dots on the right side of a view. Unfortunately you can’t select multiple views at once, this has to be done one by one. In order to hide a view, you can click on the three dots and select ‘Hide’ or you can hover on the left side of the view name and click on the hide icon, which looks like an eye with a slash through it. This is also how you can unhide hidden views. The other thing I noticed is that if you want to make changes to an existing personal view, you can’t do that from the ‘Manage and share views’ area. You would have to select the view you want to edit in the view selector, then user the ‘Edit columns’ and ‘Edit filters’ buttons on the top right side of the screen to make your changes, and lastly you would need to click on the view selector again and click on ‘Save changes to current view’.

Modern Advance Find

In order to open the modern advanced find, you’ll need to click your mouse in the Dataverse search bar on the top of the page. Once you click inside the search bar, you’ll notice recent searches, recent records and the ‘Search for rows in a table using advanced filters’ on the bottom. When you click this the application will open a side panel on the right side of the screen. In the side panel you can choose the table you want to search, or you can start entering the table name to search for it in the list of tables. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when searching for tables in the new advanced find: you can only search for tables that are part of the model driven app. The tables also need to be enabled for the unified interface, and of course the user will need to have read access to the table.
Unfortunately I can’t pick an existing view to start my search with, like I was able to do in the legacy advanced find. It loaded the ‘My active contacts’ view automatically and navigated to that view as well. I tried selecting a different contact view and opening advanced find again, but this didn’t change it from loading the ‘My active contacts’ view. This is because this view is my default view. When I changed my default view to the ‘All Contacts’ view and re-opened the modern advanced find, it loaded that view for me inside of advanced find.

You probably noticed that after you choose the table you want to search, you’ll see the advanced filters page loaded in the side pane. From here you can add your search parameters, and just like with the legacy advanced find, you can also pull in other tables. Once I configured the filters, I clicked ‘Apply’, which closed the side pane and loaded the results of the query on the page.

I noticed the view now has an asterisk(*) next to it’s name, reminding me this view has been edited. In order to return to the query, and add additional filters I clicked ‘Edit filters’ on the right top of the view. This experience is a lot different from the legacy advanced find, but I can work with this. In order to add columns to the view, I need to use the ‘Edit columns’ button which sits next to the ‘Edit filters’ button on the top right of the view. This will again open the side pane, allowing me to add or remove any columns to the view. Again, if I needed to bring in columns from other tables like the account table, I can do all of that from here. When you’re completely done with building your view, you can save the view as a new view, or if you are editing an existing personal view you can save the changes to the view. You can do this by clicking on the view selector and clicking ‘Save as new view’ or ‘Save changes to current view’.

Things that are still missing for me today in the modern advanced find:
1. The ability to export the fetch XML of the view (will become available at a later date)
2. The ability to filter on non-related tables (for example searching for accounts that have no cases or opportunities attached) (will become available at a later date)
3. The ability to export to excel directly from the view without having to save the view (Thanks Jukka Niiranen for mentioning this)

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