Forcing Field Requirements upon Closing a Case or Opportunity

When resolving Cases or closing Opportunities in CRM, sometimes you want to be sure to capture specific information that is important to your company before the CRM Case or Opportunity gets closed. However, marking a field “required” in CRM is not always the best option because fields that are set to Business Required must be filled in before the record is even saved. In addition, marking required fields in a Business Process Flow Ribbon does not always work, specifically if the user closes a Case or Opportunity from the button on command bar.

With CRM Real Time Workflows (introduced in CRM 2013), there is a unique way to require a user to populate specific fields before the Case or Opportunity is closed. Below is how you can do this:

Scenario Example: In CRM, we want to be sure the Subject field (see below) is filled in with a value before the case is resolved. With that being said, we don’t want to make the field required on the form because often, the user won’t know the value until it is time to resolve the case.

Therefore, we need to create a “Real-Time” CRM Workflow. Here is how the workflow is constructed:

First, set up a workflow. Be sure to uncheck the box titled, “Run this workflow in the background”. Doing so will make the workflow run in Real-Time.

Next, construct the workflow as follows:

Here is what the user will see if he or she tries to resolve a case when a value for the Subject field was not chosen.

Since this is a Real-Time Workflow, the case workflow will prevent the case from being Resolved. The users can then update the Subject field and resolve the case without any Business Process Error.

That is it! Hopefully, you can find many uses for similar “Real-Time” Workflows!

by InterDyn BMI