Groupby Business Unit – even when not present (i.e. Activities/Opportunities)

In setups where both Users and Teams own records, it can sometimes be useful to group data by the owning Business Unit, rather than by the Users or Teams individually.

Most entities allow you to add an “Owning Business Unit” column in Advanced Find to take care of that, but some do not. Most notably the Activity entities, incl. Phone Calls, Appointments, etc. do not have this option. We can only get access to the “Owner”, “Owning User” and “Owning Team” from the UI. Regardless of which one we use, either we will get Teams separately from Users or we will only see the Business Unit related to either the Team or the User. This is also the case for the Opportunities entity.

Of course, the records still have an Owning Business Unit, and luckily, we can still call it in the chart xml directly.

Just copy the <link-entity> tags and the groupby attribute from a CRM chart xml that does support “Owning Business Unit” in the UI. Then use it to replace the attribute groupby line in your Activity chart xml.

Or just grab the code from here.

<link-entity name="businessunit" from="businessunitid" to="owningbusinessunit" link-type="outer">
<attribute groupby="true" alias="REPLACE ALIAS" name="name" />
</link-entity>

Just insert the alias from the original groupby attribute where it says “REPLACE ALIAS”.

Grouping directly by Business Unit allow you to see both User owned and Team owned records as one. That way you don’t have to create 2 charts or create multiple series that go through the “Owning User” and “Owning Team” fields to find the proper Business Unit.

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