Sep 21, 2014

Plug-in concerns: synchronous or asynchronous, transactional or not …

When developing plug-in we have to make few main decisions based on the requirement. Most fundamental thought comes to our mind is whether we need to do in Pre stage or Post stage, which is usually not hard.

Synchronous or Asynchronous

Then we need to decide, whether it is a synchronous or asynchronous. In my opinion, unless there is very specific reason, it’s good to work synchronous, which is real time. Meaning is once synchronous process is started, user can’t proceed to next step till it finishes. Best fruit is you know if there is any error sooner than later. You will simply see an exception thrown if something is wrong.

Yet, there are specific scenarios you will be forced to go for an asynchronous ones. Best example I encountered is some batch processes that needs a long time to complete. Asynchronous process works in the background, allowing user to proceed to next step. I have done very successful batch processes in asynchronous mode that took 5 to 10 hours to complete.

Problem with asynchronous execution is, you don’t know if an error occur because it’s happening in the background. You may need to check system jobs to see if there are errors.

Transactional or Not

When we discuss about the synchronous and asynchronous modes, we are also forced to discuss about transactions. All asynchronous plug-ins are none-transactional, which means.. if plug-in fails in some point, all the operations happened till that failure are valid. Suppose my batch process needs to process 100 records in one go. If it fails in 61st record due to an data issue, first 60 records have already processed correctly.. Only remaining 40 are un-processed. That’s because asynchronous plug-ins are none-transactional.

In fact, my golden rule for asynchronous ones is use a proper tracing mechanism inside the plugin code. So you are able to see what went wrong after the execution, in case of a failure. Otherwise, how do you know what processed and what not? Knowing Point of failure is important here.

It is best to work synchronous plug-ins for important calculations of payment & etc. for example. Since its best to have nothing as the outcome than having half of the steps… (Ex: Paying the commission for a sale and not doing the sale actually could be horrible than happening nothing.) Fruit of synchronous plug-ins is (with one exception…a special case) they are transactional. That means, if it fails in some point all the previous operations would be reversed. Outcome is 100% or nothing. No need to worry about the point of failure.

Importance of Pre-validation

Let’s talk about the “special case”.. if you register the synchronous plug-in in the pre-validation, it is none transactional. Please refer this article, which explains it really well. It sounds like, the transaction starts in some point and Pre-validation stage occurs before that.

http://mscrmtools.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/crm-2011-plugins-welcome-to.html

How to throw exception while keeping the changes

Depending on the situation, transactional operations could be annoying too. Recently I wanted to write a plug-in that needs to throw an error to show a message to user, but I didn’t want to roll back what I did so far. Since I need to throw the exception, I have to go for a synchronous plug-in definitely, but it rollbacks everything as soon as they through the exception. Only solution was to register it in pre-validation. (Synchronous in pre-validation is not transactional.. this is the special case we discussed)

So these are some concerns about the plug-in designing.

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