{Dynamics CRM/ 365 + Add New Bug} Add New (+) button not visible in sub-grid in Quick form View in Dynamics CRM 2016. Bug or expected behavior?

Back sometime I wrote a blog post on how to show related activities of an account on the contact form using Quick View feature. Here is the blog post link. Back then it was 2013 version of CRM and it generated quite an interest.

It worked great and a great advantage was people could even add activities to the account from the contact form only using the ‘Add New’ button of the sub-grid in the quick view form.

However recently, I received multiple queries on my blog about not being able to add new record from the sub-grid in quick view form. One common thing that I noticed is that all of them are on CRM 2016. Honestly I did not notice this at first sight. However I tried this myself and unfortunately I faced the same error.

As you can see there is no ‘+’ icon in the sub-grid. Checked the quick view configuration and all. Everything seemed fine. I had one CRM 2015 on-premise version. Checked and it was working fine in that environment.

So what has been change in the form rendering between 2015 and 2016 version and suddenly remembered that CRM introduced turbo forms in Dynamics CRM for improved performance during form load in the 2015 Online Update 1.

So I just went to Settings –>Administration –> System Settings and turned on – ‘Legacy form rendering’.

Now when I refreshed CRM Contact form again, I could see the ‘+’ icon back. Surprised? Yes even I was.

This is giving a big headache to many and I keep receiving questions about whether it is a bug. Looks like it is. Specially for customers who have upgraded from CRM 2015 to 2016, they could suddenly find this functionality not working and its kind of annoying and it is very hard for consultants to explain that something OOB is not working after upgrade

I suggested this workaround for some, however as expected this is not a very viable solution to propose to the customer. A significant performance degradation has been observed by consultants for forms with lot of controls and scripts in legacy form rendering and many consultants promised a better performance to their clients after upgrade with the new turbo forms feature.

I am open to suggestions here and would like to know if this is a bug? Or in case I have missed some documentations by Microsoft which highlights this point.

Hope this helped!

Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP