It has long been possible to streamline the form submission process for your customers by pre-populating forms sent out through Click emails (if you are not familiar with this process, you can read about it here). This is great, but you can only populate data from the recipient's record, so what if you are sending out a form in which you need some data from the recipient's parent account as well? This can be accomplished using a pair of simple workflows.
NOTE: Workflows are native to Dynamics and are not a part of the Click solution, so the technical support we can provide for them is limited.
How do I get the parent account data onto the form? In order to pre-populate the data from the parent account record, it will need to be stored somewhere on the contact record. You may or may not need to make some custom fields depending upon what data you want and how you are currently using your contact record. Once your record is ready to house the parent account data, you can add it to your contacts using the following workflow:
The workflow is based on the Contact entity and is set to run when the Company Name field on the contact record is updated. Once the field is changed, the workflow will be triggered and an Update Record step will run that will update the contact record by populating the fields for parent account data with the corresponding data from the parent account (note that the workflow can be set to run as an on-demand process to update contacts who already have a parent account specified on their record). Now that the data is on the contact, you can set it to pre-populate the form like you would any normal contact data, such as first name or email address.
How do I get the parent account data back onto the account? When your form is submitted, the updated parent account data will be mapped back to the contact record. In order to have this updated data mapped to the account record, use the following workflow:
This workflow is also based on the Contact entity, but it is set to run when one of the fields containing the parent account data is updated. This workflow starts with a Check Condition step that checks to see if the field was modified by the Click service user (the specific name of the user will vary from customer to customer and will not necessarily match the name in the screenshot). This will indicate that the fields were updated by the form submission mapping data back to the contact. After this, the workflow runs an Update Record step that updates the parent account record with the updated data that is stored on the contact record.