RSMUS.comForm controls for text fields
Microsoft is placing a greater emphasis on enhancing user experience while saving time, energy, and money for organizations. This is especially noticeable through Dynamics 365’s (formerly known as Dynamics CRM) inclusion of many controls that support the modern sales process. This post will focus on the controls used for text fields in multiple lines of text and single line of text.
Signature control
The signature control allows for agents to receive customer approval on the spot.
Several use cases and benefits include:
- Agent comes on-site and wants customer to sign off on work completed
- Allows companies to go paperless
- Work can be completed on-site and does not require agent to come back to office
The signature control can be configured for any Multiple Lines of Text field. The maximum length should be at least 15,000 characters to ensure the data can be captured and saved to CRM.
Edit the properties and navigate to the Controls tab and click Add Control…
Select the Pen Control and click Add.
Add pen control for phone and tablet.
Final result on a mobile app allows options to clear the signature, or accept the signature. Once accepted, the field can no longer be edited.
It is important to be aware that the input is not saved as an image once you navigate back to Dynamics 365. Only a text code is displayed. It may be a good idea to lock or hide the field on the web interface so that users do not accidentally change the value. While this does allow you to capture a signature, be sure to work with your legal department to clarify what constitutes a formal signature and is legally binding.
For more information on pen control, click here.
Input masks
Data consistency is a problem for most organizations, and one way to help alleviate this pain point is to use a control to oversee what a user is allowed to input into a text field. The input masks acts as a user generated set of rules in order to validate a field. This is very important to prevent transcription errors (especially with increased usage on mobile devices and tablets where touch screens are smaller and keyboards are not always readily available.)
Several use cases and benefits include:
- Agent at trade show collecting contact information from leads
- Ability for leads to have consistent format with all other contacts
- Storing properly formatted phone numbers, postal codes, credit cards
- Increase data accuracy & prevents transcription error
- Prevents data clean up and re-work later
The input mask can be used for be configured for any Single Line of Text field.
Edit the properties and navigate to the Controls tab and click Add Control…
Select the Input Mask and click Add.
Add input mask for phone and tablet then edit the mask to configure the mask properties.
Select configuration then click OK:
- Bind to a static value. Select the data type, such as a whole number (Whole.None), currency, floating point (FP), or decimal. Next, enter a number that represents the minimum accepted value for the field.
- Bind to values on a field. Select a field from the list that will be used as the minimum accepted value.
Final result on a mobile app allows user to enter data only in the defined format. If the format is ignored, an error will appear.
For more information on input masks, click here.
To learn more about how you can take advantage of this and other Dynamics 365 features, visit RSM’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 resource. To make sure you stay up to date with the Microsoft Dynamics Community, subscribe to our Microsoft Dynamics Community Newsletter.
For more information on Microsoft Dynamics 365, contact RSM’s Dynamics Professionals.
By: Cassey Dang
