Canvas-app support for polymorphic lookups to the Owner, Customer, and Regarding entities

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Canvas-app makers can work with polymorphic lookups to the Owner, Customer, and Regarding entities in a strongly typed manner. In the formula language for canvas apps, we've added the Record Reference data type and the IsType and AsType functions for working with those references. This functionality requires the Relational data, option sets, and other new features for CDS setting under App settings to be enabled, as it is by default.

Before this change, we blocked these fields because polymorphic lookups are exposed in an untyped manner in Common Data Service and canvas apps are inherently strongly typed. To work with these fields, app makers would have had to manage GUID IDs and entity-type strings, and we wanted to provide a better experience before we made these fields available.