Implementing The Calendar Control in Unified Interface.

With the addition of Unified Interface to the Dynamics 365 comes some new features including the new Calendar Control. The Calendar Control allows you to view a set of records on a calendar, making it really easy to see any records that rely on a date field.

In today’s example, I’ll walk you through how to set up the calendar control to show a view of emails that are scheduled to be sent out.

To start, we’ll need to access the Advanced Settings to modify the View. In the top right corner of the window, click on the gear icon to access settings. Click on Advanced Settings.

Once the Advanced Settings are opened, it’ll look just like the Classic Customise the System window. Navigate to the Email Send entity and select the Views menu, double clicking on the Scheduled view:

Once the Scheduled View window pops up, you’ll see an option to add Custom Controls on the right-hand side:

From here click on the Add Control option, select Calendar Control from the menu and ensure it is enabled for Web as shown below:

Once the Calendar Control is implemented, we now have a number of options we can select to determine where and how records are displayed on the calendar.

The Start Date and the Description are required and must both be set. In this case, as we’re displaying a calendar view of emails that have been scheduled for sending, I have bound the Send On field to the Start Date. I have also bound the Subject to be displayed as the description on the calendar view. Another option here would be to utilize the Name field if you wanted to display a value other than the Subject Line.

There are also some optional fields in here such as Duration and Color. I wanted to show a specific colour per type of email I am sending, so I added a custom Option Set field to my Email Send record called Email Type. When the Email Send is being created, the end user would now be able to categorise the email as shown below:

Option Sets are unique in that you can assign a colour to a value. In my case here, I have assigned different colours to each value so that when the records are displayed on the Calendar view, it’s easy to see what type of email is scheduled and for when.

Once these values have been set up, it’s important to save and publish any changes made to the environment:

Once this has been published, navigate to the Email Sends entity and change the view to Scheduled. From there, click on the Show As option from the Ribbon and select Calendar Control:

Your view will now change to show all Scheduled Emails for the Day/Month/Week including a colour code of the email type!

Now it’s easy to look over the month and see what emails are scheduled for sending out! This control can be applied to multiple views and entities so I encourage playing around with this super useful control!