Displaying inactive records in associated view

In some situations you do want to show the inactive records in an associated view as well. My fellow MVP George Doubinski wrote an article about how to solve this by using a plugin:
http://crm.georged.id.au/post/2008/03/07/Displaying-inactive-records-in-associated-view.aspx.

In this post I will show that there are more routes to Rome. I've looked into the option of editing the query which is being executed against CRM. This seemed to be more easy then expected. What I did is:
- Export Customizations for the specific entity
- Open the XML file with a text editor
- Look for the section ""
- Look for the saved query with the localized name of the associated view
- In that saved query look for the filter that is specified in the columnset
- Remove the filter
- Save the Customizations file
- Import the Customizations file
- Publish the Customizations

Here's an example:

<ImportExportXml version="4.0.0.0" languagecode="1043" generatedBy="OnPremise">
<Entities>
<Entity>
<Name .... />
....
<SavedQueries>
<savedquery>
<columnsetxml>
<columnset version="3.0">
<column>fullname</column>
<column>createdon</column>
<column>statuscode</column>
<column>subject</column>
<column>leadid</column>
<ascend>createdon</ascend>
<!-- Delete from here -->
<filter type="and">
<condition column="statecode" value="0" operator="eq" />
</filter>
<!-- Delete till here -->
</columnset>
</columnsetxml>
....
</savedquery>
</SavedQueries>
....
</Entity>
</Entities>
....
</ImportExportXml>

Keep in mind that you do add the attribute StateCode or StatusCode to the associated view as well, so that end users can see which records are current and which are inactive.

One of the locations that this is useful, is when you are looking into relationships. The out of the box entity does allow you to select party 1, party 2, role 1 and role 2, but no real extensibility options. You could recreate that entity and add useful attributes like startdate and enddate. As soon as the end date has passed, then the record can be deactivated by using workflow. The fact that a person had a professional relationship with a company is information that you do want to keep visible, especially in the associated view.