How to show nested grid of child items in views of Dynamics 365/ Model Driven apps

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. In today’s blog, I will discuss about an interesting feature related to Dynamics 365 Apps/ Model Driven apps.

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With this feature it is now possible to show related child records in nested grid from within a parent view, similar to the below illustration. Let’s get started.

This feature is available with Power Apps Grid control. To enable the Power Apps Grid control, open your entity in classic view and then Navigate to the Controls tab.

Add the ‘Power Apps Grid control‘ and under the Property section you will find Child Items (preview). Click on the Edit icon on the property.

You will get a dialog prompt to select the related child table that you want to show in the nested view. I want to show the active milestones related a project record.

So I selected ‘Milestones‘ for Entity field and ‘Active Milestones‘ for View.

As a next step, click on the Edit icon on the property – Child Items Parent Id as show in the illustration below.

Here you will need to select the Parent Id field in the child record to display the relationship data. This is precisely the lookup column of the parent in the child table.

Remember – Polymorphic lookups, out-of-box or custom is not supported. Hence you will not be able to select Customer column type or any other polymorphic lookup columns in this dialog. Those fields won’t show up.

Once you have selected the desired Parent Id field, you need to save and publish your changes. Once the publish is successful, refresh your model driven app and you should be able to see the related child records inside from the view of parent table.

In the illustration below, the milestones related to the project table are showing in a nested view.

I hope this helped.

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Debajit Dutta
Business Solutions MVP