Hello everybody,

today I want to write a short note on types of fields in Dynamics CRM.

So, below goes list of types:

• Single line of text
• Multiple line of text
• Option set
• Two options
• Whole numbers
• Floating point
• Decimal
• Currency
• Date and Time
• Lookup

Names of them are pretty self-explanatory, but few words I'd like to add.

Single line of text is good for storing some small portions of text like first name, last name, title of book, title of product etc. Due to this it has limitation to 4K of data.

Multiple line is larger, up to 1 Mb of data. 

Option set is a list of specific items. They can be local or global. Local means that they can be applied to only one entity. Global means that you can apply it to any entity.

Two options is just as it says, two options. That is tricky part from viewpoint that sometime initially you have something like two options, but later you'll discover that according to business they extended list of options and instead of two you've got three. Then it will be impossible to convert two options set into just option set.

Whole numbers, floating point, decimal are quite clear for understandint, so I'll skip it.

Currency is also interesting beast. If you'll add currency to some entity and then monitor that entity in db, you'll notice that instead of one column you've got two columns. The first will be dedicated to base currency, and another will be dedicated to transactional currency.

About Date time just one trick notice. You can choose only date, but again in DB it will be represented as date and time, you'll just will not see time part at CRM.

Lookup is very similar to option set, but with one distinction. It's like bridge between entities.