CRM 2011 Point of View - What is the scope of a deactivated View?

Views are a great way to provide the user with data filtered on a very specific criteria that is easily accessible. The view can be a system level view, which means that all users with the right security role can see the view, or the view can be a personal view, visible only to the user (which can then be shared).

In this post, I want to talk a little bit about the system views and what it means to have a view in the deactivated state.
As I mentioned earlier, the OOB CRM system comes with a list of system views. The idea is to provide coverage for as many of the common cases as possible. For example, the Case entity has ~12 system views that are in the active state.

While this is a great jumping off point, we need to evaluate the merits of having all of these views in the system, for the simple reason that we do not want to clutter the view list and make the correct view selection difficult.

Its easy enough to deactivate the views that are not necessary - go to Settings/ Solutions/ Open the solution and navigate to the Case entity. Go to the Views, select the view and under Actions click on "Deactivate".

Now there might be situations where you want to use a system view in the dashboard or sub grid exclusively - meaning you do not want to see the view name in the list of views for the entity. How do we achieve this?

Actually, it is pretty simple. Follow these steps in the order in which they are listed:

1. Create custom system view(s) to use in dashboard or sub grid.
2. Create/ Update the dashboard or sub grid with the newly created custom view.
3. Deactivate the system view from the view list, thus making it not available in the view drop-down.

Notice that the view, even though it is deactivated, still shows up correctly in the dashboard or sub-grid  The reason is that deactivating the view only sets the visibility from the view list, but any references to the deactivated view are still persisted and honored. 

Note: There is one big no-no when following this approach. While creating the list component, make sure to turn off the View selector option. The reason is that if the user selects a different system view to display from the view list, he or she will NOT be able to get back to the deactivated view, as the deactivated view is not available to select.