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A great new feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 is support for configurable business rules. This new feature allows business specific logic checks to be added to Dynamics CRM forms without the need for Javascript or other custom programming.
Defining a Business Rule
From the form designer a new Business Rule button is available on the toolbar. From here the Business Rules for the form can be defined and managed.
From the Business Rule Explorer we can define a new Business Rule to apply to form.
After naming the rule we can define the Condition, Action and Description for the rule.
Condition: Each rule has a Condition set, which defines the logic that will result in the rule being applied. For example If Contact Type Equals 'Member'. Multiple conditions can also be applied to create more complex logic.
We can then define what Action should be taken when the Condition is met.
Action: Dynamics CRM supports a range of different action types to make it easy to control how the form interface will behave e.g. Set Visibility on an attribute, or define whether a field is mandatory.
Multiple Actions can also be defined as illustrated below:
Once defined the business rule can be activated in a similar manner to Workflows in previous versions of Dynamics CRM.
We can now see the form as it would be displayed for the account "C2 Software" and the business rule will be applied:
Conclusion
Business rules are a powerful new addition to Dynamics CRM, reducing development and maintenance costs. It will greatly reduce the amount of custom code written for Dynamics CRM and will make future upgrades a simpler task to perform. The feature is available as standard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.