One of the most common customizations almost any organization working with customers from multiple countries will want to have in their Microsoft Dynamics CRM data model is the addition of a structured list of country names, to ensure they are stored in a consistent format. Yes, by default the Country/Region fields on the account, contact and lead entities are free text fields that a user must manually fill every time. This can result in some serious issues with data quality that make it difficult to perform a common task such as searching for accounts from specific countries. The field may contain values like “United States of America”, “United States”, “USA”, “Estados Unidos de América”, not to mention different conventions for upper/lowercase letters, hyphens etc.
Why doesn’t Dynamics CRM come with a pre-configured list of countries? There are probably several reasons for the choice of this design, some of them which date back to the early days when CRM wasn’t a multi-language platform (before version 4.0 came along). Anyway, there’s absolutely nothing stopping us from fixing this gap by using the basic customization tools, so let’s get right to it!
Picking the right Country field option
There are two alternative approaches to implementing a controlled list of values for country names. You can either create a new option set (preferably a global one) or a new entity to hold the country name values. There are pros and cons to each method, which means the right choice depends on the use cases of the organization in question. In a simple scenario the option set may well be sufficient, if there are no other requirements for country data in CRM. For implementation guidance, look no further than this excellent post by Pedro Innecco: Dynamics CRM: Adding a Country/Region option set using ISO 3166-1.
Sometimes the country data management requirements may be somewhat more complex, which may lead you into choosing to create a custom Country entity. This approach has the benefit of allowing you to store other variables than just the name of the country on the same record. For example, there may be parameters related to reporting that are country specific and would therefore be logically placed on the same record as the official name of the country. Other regional variables such as states or languages spoken are also a natural fit to be stored on the country entity.
One interesting scenario to explore is the possibility of using the Country records as a central location for posting updates specific to a particular region, by using Activity Feeds on the Country record’s wall. Let’s say you have a multi-region Dynamics CRM implementation and you want to target auto-posts to users working with customers from specific countries. By generating posts like “New campaign Big Fair 2012 launched in @Finland” or “Major opportunity closed in @Sweden for account Contoso” that mention the country record you can easily push updates to any user who’s following that particular country. For a more detailed explanation please see my earlier post on how to make CRM Activity Feeds easier to follow by creating custom groups.
There’s a catch with the custom entity approach, though, and that is the lack of native support for multiple languages. While the option set labels are a part of Dynamics CRM solution files and support translations just like your regular form fields, a custom entity is just data stored into the CRM database, no matter if you use it in a metadata like manner. As a result, if your CRM organization has different languages enabled and the user switches from English to Spanish, the value on the Country field on the account form won’t change from “United States of America” to ”Estados Unidos de América”. If you had used an option set, all you’d need to do is export the labels for translation, enter values for the Spanish language column for the option set values, import it back and publish the results. However, with the custom Country entity we’ve ended up choosing, the value stored in the name field of the Country record will display the same way, regardless of the UI language of the logged in user.
Nothing a little Jscript can’t fix
Lucky for us, Pedro has come up with a solution that can also handle the multi-language support requirement when using a custom entity to hold the country labels. In the image below, you can see an account record viewed first in English, then in Finnish. Even though we’re using a lookup field to the Country entity on the account form, the label of the selected Country record has magically been translated from one language to another. As if that wasn’t enough, also the Look Up Record dialog window shows a list of values that has been tailored to the language of the user. Well, that looks like the best of both worlds, doesn’t it?
How can you switch the label in the lookup field then? All you need to do is to download the Country/Region for Dynamics CRM solution created by Pedro Innecco and configure your CRM organization to take advantage of the scripts included. The solution also provides the ability to add more languages, so I’ll list out the steps I followed to add the Finnish language support for this Country lookup field.
