Advanced Lookups in Power Platform model driven apps

The lookup control has been a mainstay in Dynamics for as long as I can remember and has seen many different iterations over the years. Now in Power Platform model driven apps we have another improvement to the control, which makes working with large data sets and multiple entities much easier.

With the existing lookup control it’s pretty intuitive, you can review and select records that you have worked with recently, or you can use the search functionality to find the record that you want to associate to your record.

But when there are multiple entities such as the regarding field on an activity type entity, or when you have a huge list of records to search through and choose from it can become a little difficult to find what you want.

In steps Advanced Lookup.

Now in the future, this feature will be enabled by default, but if you're reading this post before that's the case then to enable it head on over to the Power Platform admin center and select the environment that you want to enable the feature in.

Then select Settings -> Product -> Behavior.

Down in the bottom right you can see the toggle control to enable the feature.

Now when you open a lookup you’ll see the option to open the Advanced Lookup down in the bottom right.

Clicking this opens up the Advanced Lookup dialog, which is a near full screen dialog that allows you to select between the different entities that are available for your lookup down the left hand side.

Near the top you can change the view that you are using in the lookup as well as being able to search within that view to find the record that you want.

If you can't find the record that you need you can create a new record using the Add new button in the top right, you can also further filter the view by only showing the records that you own.

Once you have found the record that you are looking for you can select it and it'll be added to the selected records list at the bottom.

If this is a multi-select lookup such as the to and cc fields on an email record, then you can select multiple records and the click done to add them into the lookup.