In our day to day consulting life we often come across requirements around data input validation. The business user would often  like the captured data to be  validated by the system to ensure the data is  in a correct format for better readability and validity.

To facilitate this sort of requirements a new control was introduced in version 9 of Dynamics 365 called the “Input Mask”. This control currently works only with the tablet/mobile app of D365. With the input mask control, you can format a field like phone number or credit card to prevent entering invalid data. For example, if you want users to enter a United States phone number in the format +1-222-555-1011, use the input mask +1-000-000-0000.

In this article lets have a look on how to enable this control and how it works.

Steps

Note:
- Input Mask control only supports Single Line of Text field type
- Input Mask control only works on phone and tablet app
  1. Double-click the field or list you want to add the control to.
  2. Click the Controls
  3. Click Add control .       
  4. Select the “Input Mask” control and then click Add.
  5. Select the devices you want the control to appear on (phone, tablet, or both).
  6. Configure the values for each property.
  7. Click OKwhen you’re done configuring the control.

    Input mask by Binding to a value on a field

    • There is also another way to apply the field mask where the format of the value can be stored in a field and it can be referenced
    • To do this you need to first, create a field and store the format of the value in it.
    • The field name can be referenced as below
  • Once the configuration is complete. Publish the changes and the validation will work in the phone and Tablet interfaces.

 

 

This is a great feature that was provided by the version 9 of D365 . I sincerely hope this gets enabled for the web client as well. I Hope this article will help you in your day to day consulting work . If there are any questions please feel free to email or comment.