Today I want to share with you something that I’ve realised. Changing field labels can have unintended consequences!

Let’s cast our minds back to the days of ‘traditional’ Microsoft CRM, or as it’s so lovingly referred to nowadays, ‘model-driven’ apps. What you had were a number of entities (eg Accounts, Contacts, etc), all of which contained fields. Fields could be different types (text, integer, boolean etc), and have varying properties on them. You could set them to be required (or not), searchable (or not), and have so much fun.

At the heart of a field is the name that it has. Well, technically there are two names. One is the actual database name. Once a field was created & saved, this was effectively written in stone. The only way to handle a situation where you spelled this incorrectly was to delete it, and then recreate it. Even then, it could still be floating around in the back-end database in its original form.

The second name is the Display name (or Display label). This was the text used on the entity form itself, & could be changed as desired. This was actually really useful – many a time a business unit would say something like ‘we don’t want the field to show as Zip/Postal Code’; we want it to say ‘Postcode’. Well, that was easy enough to address – simply go ahead, load up customisations, & change the display name property for the field. Everyone was impressed & happy, and could get on with their work.

There were of course times that Business Unit A would say ‘I want ‘ABC’ as the display name’, and then Business Unit B would say ‘Ah, but I want ‘XYZ’ as the display name!’. To handle this, it was very possible to customise the label on the form itself, which would then override the display name value. This, of course, would only be valid for that specific form, so it was then imperative to have different forms for the different business units.

Now, in the good old days we use to create SQL queries against the database, SSRS reports, etc. In order to do this, we needed to know the actual underlying (database) field name. We could of course open up customisations, & start trawling through, but there are better methods for doing this. One of these is Level Up by Natraj Yegnaraman. This can be found at https://github.com/rajyraman/Levelup-for-Dynamics-CRM, and is an extension which can be run on Chrome, Edge on Chromium, & FireFox).

Using this amazing tool, it was possible to merely load an entity form up in an existing system, and then TADA! At the click of a button (well, two clicks actually), the underlying database name was revealed. This was an absolute lifesaver, so many times.

So there we’ve been, toddling along for many years like this. It worked, and worked well. All was good.

Then came along canvas apps. Now I’m not a canvas app guru by any means – I’m quite new to them, and still trying to wrap my head around the ‘special’ way in which they operate. Thankfully there are quite a few gurus in the community who have given me help in one way or another to learn how to carry out various functions, and I think that I may JUST be starting to get the hang of it.

With the current COVID-19 situation, I’ve been working on a series of apps for work, to help local authorities. One of these is a canvas app for call centres, to record information easily & quickly. We chose to go down the canvas route due to being able to have a clean layout, as well as being able to display information for the operators to read. This would have been much more difficult in a traditional model-driven app, especially as such things as dialogues have been deprecated.

One of the functions that I’ve had to learn to do this has been to use the ‘Patch’ function (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/functions/function-patch for more information on this. The following is an example of one of the Patch statements that I was using:

This was working remarkably well – it was creating the task record, and setting all of the different values that I needed. For those who are curious as to why I was using a Patch statement, rather than submitting the form, it was due to needing to set the ‘Regarding’ field, which has some very special behaviour!

Then someone on the team said ‘Hold on – we’re only storing one address. Let’s change the field display names to remove the ‘Address 1′ part, so that we don’t confuse users’. OK – I didn’t INITIALLY see any issue with this. I bet that you can see what’s coming through…

Yes – you’re right. The patch statement isn’t referring to the field database name. It’s referring to the field display name! The reason for this is that this is the syntax that Canvas Apps use – there doesn’t seem to be a way to refer to the actual underlying field database name

Of course, I only actually discovered this when I ran through the canvas app again. And indeed, it was whilst demonstrating it to other people! Oh joys – what a wonderful time for it to happen.

So, I then had to figure out what had happened – thankfully that didn’t take too much time. What DID take time was going through every single place in the canvas app that had code referring to the specific fields, and update them to the new (correct) values. This therefore ended up looking like:

So, the vitally important lesson to learn here is be VERY careful when changing field display names, especially if you have one (or more) canvas apps that are referencing them. The last thing that you want is a major headache in having to go back through every place that refers to them, and changing/updating the values.

The only workaround that I’d suggest, is that if you’re wanting to change how fields display in the canvas app itself, change the ‘Text’ value for the field:

That way, HOPEFULLY, nothing will break moving forward.

I hope that you’ve found this useful. If you have a different way in which you’ve handled this situation, feel free to leave a comment below!