We’ve seen three types of Rule within DocDrive’s integration from Dynamics to SharePoint – Record Rules to create a Location per Record, Lookup Rules to build hierarchies in SharePoint from the relationships in CRM, and Bucket Rules to establish common parent folders or Libraries.

An additional element we can configure is the ability for a new Record in Dynamics to automatically create a number of additional folders, libraries or even sites in SharePoint for that record.

This can be useful in certain scenarios where we have one concept in CRM that may have multiple channels of documents to store.

Say if we have an Opportunity to Tender, this may involve tracking information from the prospect, alongside our proposal

In the initial configuration of DocDrive, we can see this in the Case Entity.

So when we first create a new Case – this will result in the following structure:

New Case in DocDrive365’s Default Configuration with Three Automatic Sub-Folders

Our user can then drag and drop documents in each of these four folders to build up the Documents and Files we store for this Case.

Dragging Files and Documents into each of the Sub-Folders for the Case

This can be useful to help sub-divide documents into a logical structure within that single record in Dynamics 365.

We can see how this is implemented in the configuration area of DocDrive365 under the Case Entity.

The default Dynamics-to-SharePoint configuration for the Case Entity in DocDrive365

Initially here we see the core Location Rules for new Records of the Case Entity – which doesn’t tell us about the Child Locations created alongside the Case.

However if we click into the Mappings & Rules Tab of the Configuration Screen, this will show us the additional rules configured for Documents with Cases including any Child Location Rules:

The supporting Mappings & Rules for the Case Entity

We can add new Child Location Rules into this list, or edit/remove the exsisting rules.

These changes will take affect immediately for new Cases added to Dynamics.

(no Cases will be affected retrospectively, as DocDrive will commit the Document Location Records to CRM based on these Rules upon creation of the Case – and will rerun the logic unless the Document Location Records in Dynamics are deleted)

We can see an example of this if we add a new Child Location Rule to create a 4th Folder with each New Case.

Adding a New Child Location Rule to add a Sub-Folder for each Case based on the ‘customerid’ field in Dynamics

This Rule can result in a Fixed Folder such as ‘References’, or create a Folder based from Fields on the Case record.

The example above asks DocDrive to add a Sub-Folder based on the Customer Name for the Case, but this could be any Field in Dynamics if required.

Similarly Conditions can be attached to the Sub-Folder so this is only created when Fields on the Case meet certain values, which this guide will look at when we come to how Rule Conditions are applied for Lookup, Bucket, Record or Child Rules.

With this Rule in place, when we next create a Case, we will see the following:

Folders are often everyone’s starting point for organising documents, as the functionality resembles the traditional network share, but Metadata and Content Types in SharePoint can give us a more powerful and flexible ways of organising our files.

Our next guide in this series will look at configuring Content Types between DocDrive365, SharePoint and Office 365.