Manipulating Business Process Flow Fields with Business Rules

This is a re-post from a colleague - credit must go to Martin Miller at OA Systems for this sage piece of advice...

2013 Business Process Flows can contain fields as part of the definition.

By default, these are unlocked which may not be what you intend, especially if you want to maintain required fields by workflow or other process.

For example, you have a flag maintained by process 'All actions complete'. The Business Process Flow definition does not allow you to set the field read only or locked.

The solution is to use a Business Rule to lock the field. This will fire and will set the attribute of the field in the Business Process Flow ribbon, regardless of whether the field is elsewhere on the form.

You can also use a Business Rule to set the field value.

A Hidden Rule Around Business Rules in CRM 2013

This is a re-post from a colleague - credit must go to Martin Miller at OA Systems for this sage piece of advice...

2013 business rules fail to work when you reference a field not present on the form.

This is a gotcha if you are relying on business rules with a wide scope across multiple forms.

Not only does the business rule not complete, it does not do anything and in fact does not even throw an error.

So you cannot hope that some of your business rule will work if you reference a field not on form, none of it works, it is as though it never happened.