Having the right view on data

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No, this is not going to be a political discussion about data interpretation, it’s about which view does what. You will certainly be familiar with the so called Public Views, these are the ones the Model Driven App displays when you select a table in the navigation, but what’s a Quick Find View and a Advanced Find View? Let’s find out!

Public View

This is the only view type that you can create for an existing table! You will not be able to choose a type when creating a new view, it will always be a Public View.

But that means, in contrast to the other view types, that you will have to choose a default view for a table. This view will be used when the table is selected in the navigation of an app (at least if the view is part of the app) and as well in customization when adding a subgrid to a form.

Two public views are created for you when create a table X, “Active Xs” and “Inactive Xs”. This may not make sense for your table, you can change, rename, add and remove public views at will, only the default view cannot be removed, which also ensures there is always at least one public view present.

No matter if you chose to add a new view or change an existing one, the editor offers options, to add/remove columns and change their width. You can also manipulate sorting and filters.

If you are changing filters, make sure to reflect that on the name, ending up with “Active Xs” that actually shows all Xs will confuse everyone!

And finally, don’t forget to Save and Publish.

Lookup View

Now we have customizing out of the way, we can focus on the special views. Since you can’t create new ones, you will edit the existing view if required.

This view used by default for Lookups. This can be changed on forms, but there are parts where you do not have such a selection! Examples will be the Lookup Objects dialog that is opened when associating records N:N or the Assign dialog where the default Lookup View is fixed.

The first two columns will be shown to the user in the dialog, by default, those are the primary field (usually Name) and Created On. In my experience Created On is rarely helpful for the user, but fortunately we can change that. You can also go beyond those two columns, they will not directly be shown but can be unfolded per record with the chevron icon, so make sure to put the two most distinguishing columns up first.
All columns shown can also be searched, but they are search with a “begins with”, which should also be considered. For example with alphanumeric key with a prefix, e.g “TST-4234”, here you won’t find the record by typing “4234”!

2 more notes regarding the column order: If say the third column is matched by a search it will move up to the spot of the second column, overwriting the set column sorting. This makes it more transparent to the user why this record is shown for their search.
And if the second column is empty, the third column will also move up. This also makes sense, but can be a bit confusing if the second column is empty for some records creating a mix of columns being shown in the results.

If you choose not to use the primary field (usually Name) as first column or at all, be aware that it will still be taken as the value shown in the Lookup after selecting a record.

Quick Find View

The quick find as such has actually vanished on my apps. This view was shown when you used the search bar on the top right of a view. Instead the Copilot search bar is available to “Ask about data in this table”.

But that does not make this view useless! While the columns configured on the left pane are not relevant anymore as the Copilot search will keep the columns of the selected view (so for example “Active Xs”), the Find By columns in the right pane are still important. This section is only found on the Quick Find View and determines what fields the user can search for. They are also relevant for the Dataverse Search, but that’s something for a separate article.

Now that we have configured the Owning Business Unit (my BU is called “mariuswodtke-mvp”), we can search for it. Even though the column is not present in the view! But sadly, this is not a “contains” search, but a “begins with”, making the second query not find the record although it would fit with a contains search.

For me right now, the “Advanced Filters” do not display the added filter, making me unable to produce a screenshot, but here is the filter from the downloaded FetchXml:

<filter type="or" isquickfindfields="1">
    <condition attribute="mwo_name" operator="like" value="mariuswodtke%" />
    <condition attribute="owningbusinessunitname" operator="like" value="mariuswodtke%" />
</filter>
<filter type="and">
    <condition attribute="statecode" operator="eq" value="0" />
</filter>

Associated View

This view is shown by default whenever you select a Relationship in the Related navigation of a form. The user can switch to other views in the app, but of course they would prefer you to configure meaningful columns for this view so that they may save the extra clicks. And think about the filter as well, the default one for active records is not always the right way to go.

Advanced Find View

Now this one is really obsolete by now, I wouldn’t worry about. Advanced Find is still a thing, you can use to for example explore tables that are in your app, but not in the navigation, but this will show the default Public View.

The Advanced Find View is still accessible with detours:

Summary

For every situation the right view. Public Views are the only ones creatable by you and are usually the ones you can select manually in several customization spaces like Form- and App-Designer. But sometimes those options are not given, then the other views become important.

The Lookup View is used by default for any lookups to the given table, in the Form Designer you can usually adapt this, but some dialogs and for example Business Process Flows do not have an option to change away from that view.

The Quick Find View has special options for Find by, these are used by the search bar and Dataverse search. Just keep in mind that these work with a “begins with” filter.

The Associated View is used for the Related navigation in a form, the user can switch here to other views, but that requires extra clicks every time they open the related subgrid.

The Advanced Find View became irrelevant with the move to the modern UI as it is only used in the classic advanced find accessible trough the Power Platform Environment Settings app.