Use the Category entity to categorize Dynamics 365 records

 

Applies To: Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2016, Dynamics CRM Online

Categorizing entity records in Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps you tag the records so that you can easily search them. Use the Category entity to create and manage a hierarchical structure of categories in Dynamics 365, and then associate entity records to one or more categories.

Note

This feature was introduced in CRM Online 2016 Update 1 and CRM 2016 Service Pack 1 (on-premises).

A category can have multiple child categories, but a child category can have only one parent category. Deleting a parent Category record automatically deletes all its child records and entity associations. You define a parent category for a category using the Category.ParentCategoryId attribute.

Use the Category.SequenceNumber attribute to programmatically define the display order for categories in the hierarchy. When you a add a new category using the web client, it is automatically added after the last category in the hierarchy. You can also use the Category.CategoryNumber attribute to programmatically set or update a number for category to help you easily distinguish a group of categories. Category number can be set to any value programmatically, but is automatically set when you create a category using the web client based on the auto-numbering prefix specified by the administrator for categories in the web client (Settings > Administration > Auto-Numbering > Categories tab).

You can associate Category records with system and custom entity records by using relationships and connections. A category record can be associated with different entity records. For example, you can programmatically associate a Category record with an Account, Contact and Incident records.

By default, there is a many-to-many relationship available between the Category and KnowledgeArticle entity, and the entity record associations are stored in the KnowledgeArticlesCategories entity.

In This Section

Category entity messages and methods

See Also

Work with knowledge articles in Dynamics 365
Service entities (contract, incident, knowledge article, queue, calendar, entitlement, slakpiinstance)

Microsoft Dynamics 365

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