Business Rules in MS Dynamics CRM 2013

I finally gave MS Dynamics CRM 2013 a whirl last night and found an interesting new feature: Business Rules.

Not sure what the exact definition is, but the idea is that these rules can be used to modify the form without the need to resorting to JavaScript. This is not only good because it means that non-developers can do it but also because it means no more JavaScript !!!!!, well maybe.

This is one of the myriad of features in MS Dynamics CRM that are always mentioned as non-developer feature, but in reality it's always the developers that work with these, but I digress.

Business rules seem to be entity wide, which is a bit of a shame as it would be handy to have business rules that apply to various entities, not entirely sure I see a reasonable business case, but, generally, the fewer limitations the better.

At any rate, I created a new Entity, added a few fields and edited the form, from where I added a Business rule.

The rule will make the Class field mandatory if the Cost field is greater than £10, for instance if this were an expense you could make a explanation/justification field become mandatory when a certain threshold was exceeded.

The conditions, as well as actions, can be chained, e.g. in the invoice example, make the explanation/justification field become mandatory if it's above a certain threshold AND it's a certain type of expense only. 

Not 100% what the description is supposed to do, as it does not appear to be displayed anywhere, probably it's just another field that will never be filled in.

An immediate downside is that in this example, you would need another business rule to set it back to not required if the field is changed to a value below £10.

Anyway, here's the result:

Another downside is the lack of OR on the rules. Is it really that complicated for non technical staff to understand the or operation? or is it complex for Microsoft to implement? I don't know but there is an or feature in Advanced Find. At any rate, the lack of or in the Check Condition Actions was really annoying on Dialogs and Workflows in 2011 and this seems to be still missing in 2013.

It's of interest to note that for numeric fields, simple formulas can be used instead of fixed values, no regex for string fields though :(, again not surprising given the audience, but it would've been nice.

Also the comparison can be made against another field in the entity.

The range of actions is interesting:

• Show Error Message - Yahoo!!! no more javascript validation (in your dreams, sunshine)
• Set Field Value 
• Set Business Required
• Set Visibility
• Lock or Unlock Field

I guess this feature is a typical MS Dynamics CRM feature, where it seems like a great idea in principle but then in practice it's too limited or cumbersome but for the most basic of tasks. Designed for Power Users, used and hated by developers, more of the same.

All in all not a bad feature, I just need to start working on some MS Dynamics CRM 2013 projects now :).