Hello everyone.

This time, I will write about a problem I previously encountered regarding the view of activity entities in Dynamics 365.

What is an activity entity?

Activity entities are entities that handle various sales activities of salespeople, such as phone calls, emails, appointments, tasks, etc. (Some types of activities can be linked with Outlook, and many users who already use Outlook are pleased with the compatibility between Outlook and Dynamics.)

Technically, an activity is a special entity.
There are entities for each type of activity, such as a phone entity or an email entity, but they all behave as if they were a single entity called an "activity."

This time, we will look at a problem related to activity entities.

Activity entity views

This is one of the views for the activity entity, "My Activities."

It can be used to understand what activities logged-in users are currently engaged in.
As explained earlier, an activity entity is a collection of various types of activities, so we display activity types such as tasks, phone calls, and appointments together in a single view.

Now, let's sort this view by "Priority" so that the user can see their current activities in order of highest priority.
The results were ranked in the following order: high, low, and average.

This is arranged in the order of the Japanese words "high," "low," and "standard," but semantically, "standard" is halfway between "high" and "low," so it would be strange if the order was anything other than high → standard → low.

This is the priority option set.

The options for an option set have display names such as "High," "Standard," and "Low," but behind these names there are numerical settings: "High" is "2," "Standard" is "1," and "Low" is "0."
It would be nice if we could sort by this numerical order, but unfortunately we can only sort views by display name, and "Standard" doesn't come in the middle, which is disappointing.

Solutions

In the case of a certain user who encountered this problem, given the restriction that sorting must only be by display name, we decided to change the names of the options to "2_High", "1_Standard", and "0_Low".

However, perhaps due to the special nature of the activity entity, it is not possible to change the settings even if you try to change the display name of the "Priority" option.

*The "Save" button is not available for this item, so you cannot change and save the settings...

When I asked Microsoft how to deal with this issue, they told me that I could use the translation export/import function.

First, create a solution that contains only the activity entity and export the translations.

Next, look at the contents of the exported translation and replace any parts that have "High", "Standard", or "Low" priority with "2_High", "1_Standard", or "0_Low". (Just to be safe, we recommend making a backup of the translation data before making any changes.)

Finally, re-import the corrected translation data.

This replaces the display name of the priority and allows you to sort activities by priority in the activity view.

Final thoughts

Activity entities have special properties that are different from other entities, and while this makes them useful, they are also less flexible than other entities when it comes to customizing them as you wish.
If we come across any other examples of such constraints or solutions, we would be happy to introduce them to you.