Can you combine contact timelines in parent account timeline?

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Posted on by minibix

Hi everyone - I have a custom PowerApp using default Account and Contact entities.

My sales team wants Contact timeline posts to appear in the top level Account.

Is this possible? Can't find any info or config on it?

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Ben Thompson 1,400 on at

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Sadly not - the timeline only shows activity records that are directly related to the record being viewed.

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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In Dynamics 365 that behaviour is out-of-the-box if the parentaccountid field is set on the Contact... Here's an example below. What's strange is I've tested in a vanilla CDS environment and it doesn't work! Not sure if this behaviour changed and/or if it's only available in D365. @ben-thompson maybe you have some insights?

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Ben Thompson 1,400 on at

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@EricRegnier I've just checked and in (an old) D365:-

Contact record - activities are shown for the account when it's set in the contacts account field
Account record - activities for the primary contact are shown on the account form.

But as you say and I've just double checked the "cross over" information isn't shown in a none D365 power apps.

Now my go to check for anything that is different between worlds which my be a settings flag is Sean McNellis's OrgDbOrgSettings powertool and looking at the history there is an April 2019 flag called
EnableActivitiesTimeLinePerfImprovement so I wonder if that is the difference.

Edit - just tested on a more recent environment and it's consistent - D365 carries activity details between primary contact and account, PowerApps doesn't

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Tried changing the EnableActivitiesTimeLinePerfImprovement setting in my D365 and CDS environment and confirm there's was no effect on rolling up the activities... Do you know what that sets?

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Ben Thompson 1,400 on at

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@EricRegnier I believe it is layout changes within the timeline control.

I still can't work out how the timeline is actually populated though - but it's not directly from a view as the activitypointer system views are identical across both D365 and none D365 environments.

So how it works is an interesting question as I know of D365 customers who would really prefer the non-D365 version to separate out personal business from corporate business details.

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Yeah interested. I’ll check with the product team and see what they say.
It would be great that the timeline gives us the option to rollup child activities or not, instead of having these 2 behaviours in D365 and CDS.
Cheers

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minibix 4 on at

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Thanks - hoping this can be dropped into the next release wave...

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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So the product team confirmed this is a bug in CDS and should be the same behaviour as in D365. They will be fixing it, but as expected they don't have a specific ETA.

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Ben Thompson 1,400 on at

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Can I ask who you were talking to there as there is a niche (banking in particular) where the powerapps version would be prefered and it would be great if both options were available via a switch

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