Microsoft has introduced a lot of exciting new features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015. One in particular has us very excited, to say the least. One of the biggest developments from a programmer’s prospective is the new hierarchy property on one-to-many relationships. This property allows CRM users to define parent-child relationships without the need to create a new entity to describe the relationship. Currently, entities can have only one of these relationships defined, but the possibilities are exciting nonetheless and have loads of possible applications.

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Out of the box, some system entities (e.g. accounts, contacts, products, and users) will already have this feature enabled permanently. Other entities will have this feature but will not have it on by default, including custom entities. Developers can make use of the new operators under, above, and not under to query these hierarchies through Fetch and Query Expressions, via the SDK, to present hierarchical data to users in new ways and make use of these relationships for analytics.