Resurfacing the Jump Bar in Dynamics 365

There are a lot of new features and functionality that come with each new release of Dynamics 365, but sometimes Microsoft doesn’t just add new features, sometimes they remove functionality that has been part of the application for a long (or not so long) time. They might feel that folks don’t use any of those things anymore, or they might attempt to ‘clean up’ the application or give users more screen real estate, but in my personal opinion not every elimination is a good thing. The question then arises if it’s possible for customers to remove the removal so to speak, meaning reverting back to the functionality that was eliminated. A good example of one of those features is the Jump Bar in Dynamics 365. You must have noticed the letters A to Z on the bottom of each view. This is called the Jump Bar and these letters allow users to quickly filter out records based on a letter of the alphabet. For example if you are on the accounts view and you click on the letter b on the bar, you’ll notice that you’ll now see a filtered list of accounts that start with the letter b. I feel like the jump bar has been around for ever, giving users another way to quickly navigate to lists of filtered records.

The other day when I created a new environment in Dynamics 365, I noticed that the views looked a bit different. Each record in a view shows a circle next to it, which allows for easy record selection but the thing that stood out to me was the fact that the jump bar had completely disappeared from the view! Now the question arises, is this going to be the default setting for views going forward? I have had several folks reach out to me, complaining about this and asking me if this is something they can bring back for their users. The answer to that question is of course yes! In this article I will go through the steps that you need to take to bring the jump bar back to the application. If you’re still not sure what I am referring to then take a look at the below image.

Unfortunately this is not a setting that you can turn on in the new maker experience, which means you’ll have to use the ‘legacy’ configuration experience. The first thing you want to do is open the default solution, or you can use a solution that you created for this purpose. This will allow you to move this change to a different environment by exporting and re-importing the solution file. In this example I am going to keep it simple and make the configuration change in the default solution. In Dynamics 365 click on the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen. From there, select ‘Advanced settings’ to navigate to the legacy section of the application. Once the page opens up, you want to click on ‘Settings’ on the top left of the page and select ‘Customizations’. From here you can access the default solution by clicking on ‘Customize the System’. The default solution will open in a new window. Now keep in mind this is not a setting that we can turn on for all tables in the application, we will have to go through each table and turn it on by adding a control to the table. In my example I am going to turn this on for the account table in Dynamics 365.
Expand entities in the default solution and click on the account entity in the default solution. When the account page loads, you’ll notice 4 different tabs on the top of the page. We are going to add a control to the entity/table. Click on the control tab to access the controls for this entity/table .

Click the ‘Add Control’ button below the controls that are already listed for the entity/table. The control you want to add here is the Power Apps Grid(preview) which as the name already suggests is currently in preview. You’ll notice a few different settings in the control after it’s been added to the entity/table. With this control you can not only turn on the jump bar, but you can also configure the reflow behavior. If you are not familiar with reflow and how that works in Dynamics 365 take a look at this article that I wrote on the topic. In order to turn the jump bar on, click on the edit button next to the jump bar item below the control. This will be set to ‘disable’ by default, you want to change this to ‘enable’. Note: After 2021 Release Wave 2, this Power Apps grid control will be the default grid control.
Any changes you want to make to the reflow behavior can be done in a similar way; click the pencil/edit icon next to the ‘reflow behavior’ item to make changes. Don’t forget to configure where in the application you want this control to be active; web, phone and/or tablet. Once you have completed the changes you want to make, click the save button in the default solution. Lastly you need to click the publish button to make your changes public to all users. When you get back to the application don’t forget to refresh your page in order to see the jump bar re-appear on the bottom of the view. If you don’t see it after a page refresh try a hard refresh/clearing of the cache instead.

I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!