Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Unify Timelines across work order, account, booking etc?

Prior to scheduling a work order the back office team will be adding notes to it with images from the customer, other relevant info and such that is useful for technicians on site.
Equally, when technicians are working on a job they may record photos, add notes and such too.

We've noticed that the timeline entries with notes and such seem to attach to the work order & booking entity separately. The same can be said it seems for the timeline on other entities too.

1. Are we expecting something from timelines & notes which we should be getting from something else? I've seen a list for documents, but can't seem to see that in the field service app at all.

2. Is there a setting or config we are missing here to unify the timeline across an account, work order and booking? Most importantly the work order < -- > booking timeline is pertinent.

3. If the above do not exist, I'm guessing there are 2 ways we can go about generating this unified view:

a) Try and relate the booking and workorder timelines to look up against eachother. Maybe from another entity doing a lookup?

b) Build a custom table/entity and push into that based on trigger of creating/deleting to almost have our own event log / timeline for our use cases? We could then replace account, work order and booking timelines to give a complete history?

Thanks for any advice!

Categories:

Dynamics 365 Field Service

This is a great question, and something that I've struggled with at time in Field Service. I find it important to be able to attach notes and photos to a Booking record but having them fail to appear on the Parent Work Order feels less than ideal. So, to your question, we have a few things we can do.

In terms of the Account record, you should be able to configure the timeline control to dictate which records appear. You generally have three options, which you can find more information about here (Add and configure the timeline control in Power Apps - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn). I know this for sure works from Accounts and Contacts down through sales records and cases, but I have not tested it in Field Service (so please let me know if it works for you)
- None: Only shows activities directly related to the Account or Contact
- Related: Shows one level deep only
- Extended: Shows multiple layers deep
For the Booking and Work Order, this one is a bit tougher. I can see you working this through in a few ways (depending on your process and other settings, one may end up being better than the other).
- Create a simplified version of the Work Order Form that contains the timeline control and embed this within your booking form. From the user perspective, it looks like a normal timeline, but they will actually be adding items to the Parent Work Order (Edit table records directly from another table’s main form - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn)
- When a booking is completed, you could create a Cloud Flow that updates the [Regarding] field of the Notes/Attachments from the Booking to the Parent Work Order. This would remove them from the booking and surface them on the Work Order
- When a booking is completed, you could create a Cloud Flow that duplicates the notes/attachments from the Booking onto the Work Order. This would be less than ideal, as you would now have duplicates