Everyone knows that Dynamics 365 has many great ways to link entities together, however once they are linked what controls do we have over their behavior? Enter, Cascading Rules. Cascading rules are a set it and forget it setting which controls the behaviors between two related entities. Cascading rules in D365 allows users to control what actions are passed down from one entity to another.

A great example where cascading rules come in handy is when users want to reassign the owner for a specific account record. However, they do not want its related activities such as emails, tasks and appointments to change owner when this happens. This is when you would go into cascading rules and update the assign setting to prevent the assign action from being passed down to its related activities.

In D365 the out of box settings for cascading rules, for a good majority of relationships, is Set to Parental (Cascade All), which means the action taken on the parent entity will be passed down. Now this may be suitable for some relationships, but in the case of the assign action being applied to Activities, this typically causes some undesirable results.

Toggling the Type of Behavior to Configurable Cascading allows you to customize each of the relationship behaviors individually.

Below are the possible cascading options you can select for each action.