New Intelligent Relevance Search Experience

In November of 2020 Microsoft announced a new intelligent search experience for model-driven apps. This also means that these new search capabilities will be available for all of the Dynamics 365 model driven apps. So you are probably not surprised when I tell you that once you enable this new experience, it will be enabled for all apps in the environment. You will notice that the search icon will have disappeared from the app and a new search bar will now appear in the middle on the top of the screen. The results page has also been expanded and updated. You will notice a very comprehensive result page with additional filtering capabilities, which I will talk about later in this article. Let’s dive in!

Before you can enable this feature, you will need to have relevance search enabled on your environment. It’s important to understand that even though this new search takes advantage of the cloud based Azure search capabilities, a lot of the configuration for this experience is still done in relevance search. This means you need to enable entities that you want to be included in searches in the relevance search configuration area. Unfortunately this area is still in the legacy interface. You can access this area by navigating to https://make.powerapps.com/ (make sure you select the correct environment), opening the default solution and clicking the ‘switch to classic’ button, which will open the solution in the legacy interface. Click on ‘enties’ on the left hand side and you’ll notice ‘configure relevance search’ on the mini ribbon. This is were you can add and remove entities from the search.

In order to add entity fields to be searched, this is also still configured on the quick find view for each entity. To turn this feature on you’ll need to navigate to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ and select the environment for which you want to turn it on. Once you selected the environment you need to click on ‘settings’ and expand the ‘product’ setting where you’ll be able to open the ‘features’ settings. NOTE: If you haven’t turned on relevance search, this is where you can do that as well.
After you turn on relevance search you probably won’t immediately see the ‘Use new search experience’ slider, so be patient and come back to this area a little later. Once the button is visible (under ‘Relevance Search’) you can turn it on from here. Keep in mind it might take a while for the system to index so the search bar won’t be available immediately.

Once the indexing is completed you will notice the search bar on the top of the screen. As a user is typing data in the search bar they will notice suggestions come up. These suggestions are based on the primary field of entities and support misspelled words (by one character). To lean more about suggestions in relevance search click here. Another thing to note is that any recent searches a user has done will be ‘remembered’, which users can access by just clicking on it. Records that the logged in user has accessed recently will also show up when the user clicks inside of the search bar which also helps with productivity. These records will be grouped by entity, which makes it easier to understand the context.

Search Results Page

As I mentioned earlier, the result page has also been enhanced. When a user runs a search, they will be brought to a results page with several tabs. The ‘Top Results’ tab will automatically open first, showing the top 20 best results for the search, grouped by entity, each with their own entity view. These views are the quick find views, which means that we can still configure these views by adding view columns to them. (NOTE: We can also configure searchable (find) fields in the quick find views) The filters on the right hand side show the owner field, modified on and created on fields.
The other tabs on the result page show the results broken out by individual entity and shows filters and facets configured for that specific entity/table. Filters and facets allow users to drill down further into the data without having to constantly change their search parameters. There is no additional admin configuration to determine which fields should be added to allow users to filter on. These are certain fields that have been selected as columns on the quick find view.

Users can configure and pick their own individual facets and filters for each entity by clicking on the gear icon on the top right side and clicking on ‘Personalization Options’ selecting ‘. Under the heading ‘Select the default search experience’ they will see the ‘configure’ button for facets and filters. When the user clicks the configure button they will see a drop down for all entities/tables that have been enabled for relevance search. Users can select an entity and view the filters available. From here they can pick the different fields/filters they want to use in the search results page. By default, the first 4 ‘filterable’ fields are listed, but users can select the fields they prefer. Unfortunately users can only select 4 fields to filter on, but obviously there can be more fields available for any entity.

NOTE: Keep in mind that if an administrator removes a ‘view’ field from the quick find view or sets it to ‘not searchable’, users who added that same field as a filter will no longer be able to filter on it, it will simple disappear from the filters on in the search result page.

One last thing I wanted to note is that the search doesn’t seem to work very well if you only enter a partial search term. (Commonly referred to as ‘begins with’) When I typed in ‘A. Dat’, no results were returned, even though I have A. Datum Corporation as an account in my database, with multiple contacts, opportunties, cases, etc. When I added a star at the end of the search term (A. Dat*) I did get a list of results. So if you’re looking for a particular record that begins with a series of letters, make sure you add the star (*) to the end of the search term!

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