Announcing the general availability of the new view designer

We had recently announced the public preview of our new view designer. Since then many of you have actively used it and given us great feedback to help make it even better. Today we are happy to announce that the new view designer is out of preview and available for general use. The latest update includes additional features, added based on your feedback, to help makers quickly and productively author views.

Our classic view designer has been one of the most actively used designers. However, it hinders productivity in some key scenarios. Most notably, it does not display any data. This made it very hard to configure and fine tune filter conditions that is a key aspect of views. Similarly, adding and reordering columns is a very common task when authoring views but required multiple clicks. Filter conditions, once applied, were hard to tweak and sorting too was limited to two columns at a time.

The new view designer directly addresses all these problems faced by makers and a lot more. It displays data up front and center to help makers instantly see the effect of the filter conditions applied and change them as needed. Adding and reordering columns is quick, easy and intuitive via drag and drop or single-click column selection. Filter conditions can be quickly changed inline without having to bring up the advanced expression builder dialog and cascading sort using multiple columns can be easily applied.

New features in the most recent update include the ability to drag and drop fields from the field pane directly onto the view. Makers can select the field that they want to add and drag it to the desired location in the view header row.

Drag and drop to move columns has always been there and can be used to reorder columns as needed.

Makers can also now configure the exact column width.

• Select the column header.
• Select Edit properties.
• Set Column width to the desired value in pixels.
• Select Apply.

Another great feature is the ability to add new fields on the entity without leaving the view designer.

• Select New field in the field pane, this will display the field creation dialog.
• Provide a Display name and Name for the field.
• Select the type of the field desired and ensure the corresponding required properties are set as needed.
• Select Done.  The new field is created on the entity and automatically added to the view.

We hope that these new features along with all the benefits already offered by the new view designer further improve your productivity and experience when authoring views.

A huge thanks to everyone who has been actively using the view designer and providing feedback. Your voice has been captured in our backlog and is being used to guide upcoming features. We have created a post in our forums that we will be actively monitoring for additional feedback in the days and weeks to follow. Please use it and have your voice heard.

And if you haven’t yet tried the new view designer, get started today!