CRM 2011 - Circular Referencing

Question

Is it possible to do a circular reference in CRM 2011?

Example: I have this entity called employee. In this entity, I have this field called supervisor which is a lookup of employee entity.

I created an employee named "Marc" and in the supervisor lookup I want to select "Marc" also to do a circular reference. But I believe in CRM 2011, Self-referential relationships is that entity instances cannot be related to themselves in a parental relationship. This creates a circular reference. Is it possible? Is there a way?

Answer 1

Actually what I did to solve my problem was to create a workflow. It can be manually triggered or automatic.

For manual:

1. I created a workflow for the employee entity.
2. make it run on demand
3. Created Steps to update the supervisor lookup
4. on the supervisor lookup , I used dynamic values "{Employee{Employee}}"

For Automatic:

1. I created a new checkbox field in the employee entity.
2. Created a workflow that would trigger on change on that specific checkbox
3. Created Steps to check if the checkbox is checked or not.
4. on the supervisor lookup, I used dynamic values "{Employee{Employee}}"

Answer 2

In CRM 2011 it's not possible to create a circular reference.

An alternative is to create a "bridge" entity that will contain only the name field and a lookup to your custom entity, but I don't know if this will be useful for the users or not.