Dynamics 365 : Many to Many (N:N) Relationship

• Author
• Recent Posts

Atul Sharma

An extrovert by nature, Atul has been sharing his opinions and views on various social network platforms. He always had been thinking about having his own platform and here it is. Creative and tech-savvy Atul has a good sense of humor and when he is not programming or writing blogs or traveling, you can find him cooking, Netflixing or sleeping.

Latest posts by Atul Sharma (see all)

• RISE FROM THE ASHES – Sanjib Nandi - November 1, 2021
• साथ में मेरे दोस्त खड़े थे - August 1, 2021
• BenchmarkDotNet: Advanced Features - June 20, 2021

Relationship between two entities can be Many to Many as seen in below examples –

• One Student can be enrolled in many Courses and One Course can have many Students.
• One Opportunity can have many Client (Competitors) and One Competitor can bid for many Opportunities.

There are many similar scenarios, but I assume these two examples explain the concept well.

Basic implementation of Many to Many relationship takes place with the help of ONE INTERSECT entity. This intersect entity has One to Many relationship with both of the related entities.

Now there are two ways of implementation of Many to Many Relationship, Native and Manual.

In Native Many to Many, INTERSECT entity is hidden and you can’t add any field to that.

Another way to achieve Many to Many Relationship is Manual implementation. Here you create a new entity and establish two One to Many (1:N) relationships with respective entities. In this approach, since you create an entity from scratch so you can create any types of form with it, add any fields on it and everything you can expect from the entity.

In this article, I have explained the example of Employee and Project entity and have assumed that One employee can be part of many projects and a project can have many employees (i.e. Many to Many Relationship). For the manual implementation of Many to Many, I have used intersection entity as Assignment. You can see, I can make data entry for assignment record, can have customized subgrid to fetch relevant information, without using reporting. I can create a Business Process Flow for this.

Find here the solution of that example.

Hope this helps in understanding the concept.