When Your CRM Plays Hide-and-Seek: The Mystery of Missing Columns in Dynamics 365

What Happened? 

Personal views across multiple organizations started showing empty columns, even though the data was there. For businesses that rely on these views for daily decisions, this isn’t a normal glitch—the end users can easily assume that “no data” in the view means no data in the record and make decisions based on an incomplete picture of customer information. 

The Detective Work 

Our investigation uncovered the culprit: a mismatch between two behind-the-scenes players—View XML and Fetch XML. Think of them as the blueprint and the builder. When they don’t talk to each other properly, your view looks fine but can’t fetch the data it needs. 

Why It Matters 

This isn’t just a tech hiccup—it’s a reminder of how small cracks in system design can ripple into big business headaches. It also highlights the need for smarter automation and better error detection in enterprise platforms. 

The Fix (and the Frustration) 

The good news? A manual fix was quickly identified over a year ago. The bad news? It was manual.  And many impacted users didn’t even know that their views were bad.  We needed a better solution and now, we have one.   

Starting in October 2025, Microsoft rolled out a behind the scenes fix option.  Once it’s turned on, any time a user opens a corrupted view, that view will be automatically updated to display the correct data.  If the user has permission to edit the view, the updates will be saved so that the view will be permanently fixed.  But there’s still a catch.  Microsoft doesn’t want to enable a process that makes data changes (in this case, the data is the view definition) without your company’s permission.  If your organization is running into this issue, here’s a quick test to assure that the new Microsoft fix will work for you: 

1. Identify views that you know are not rendering properly and that you will be able to access  

1. If you create a copy of a view that is corrupted, the copy will also have the corruption, so you can create additional views to test  

1. In your browser URL bar, append the following to the end of your Dynamics URL:  &flags=FCB.DataSetViewFixMissingFetchColumns=true 

1. This will enables a “feature flag” that fixes the views issue, but only for the user that added the flag to the URL and only until their session expires.  Other users will not see the update. 

1. If your URL looks like this:   
   https://org7909d641.crm.dynamics.com/main.aspx?appid=12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012 
   … make it look like this and hit enter 
   https://org7909d641.crm.dynamics.com/main.aspx?appid=12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012&flags=FCB.DataSetViewFixMissingFetchColumns=true 

1. Wait for Dynamics to reload 

1. Test opening the corrupted views.  You’ll see that they’re magically working as expected 

When you are satisfied that this is working for you as desired, open a case with Microsoft Support and request that your organization be enabled for the DataSetViewFixMissingFetchColumns FCB.  This will enable the fix for all users across your Dynamics organization 

Takeaway: If your CRM starts acting like a magician hiding data, don’t panic. The data is still there—you just need to coax it back with the right fix. And now there’s an option to make sure that this issues goes away for good.