Late-bound and early-bound programming using the SDK for .NET

Article
09/28/2023

When you work with the SDK for .NET assemblies, you have two programming styles you can use: late-bound and early-bound.

The key difference between early and late binding involves type conversion. While early binding provides compile-time checking of all types so that no implicit casts occur, late binding checks types only when the object is created or an action is performed on the type. The Entity class requires types to be explicitly specified to prevent implicit casts.

Late binding allows you to work with custom tables (entities) or columns (attributes) that weren't available when your code was compiled.

Late-bound

Late-bound programming uses the Entity class where you need to refer to table rows and columns (entities and attributes) using their LogicalName property values:

Relationships don't have a LogicalName property, so the RelationshipMetadataBase.SchemaName property is used.

The main advantage for late-bound programming is that you don't need to generate the classes or include that generated file within your projects. The generated file can be large.

The main disadvantages are:

You don't get compile time validation on names of entities, attributes, and relationships.
You need to know the names of the attributes and relationships in the metadata.

Tip

A tool that you can use to find this information easily is the Metadata Browser. This is an app you can download and install in your organization. More information: Browse the metadata for your environment

Example

The following example creates an account using the late-bound style.

//Use Entity class specifying the entity logical name
var account = new Entity("account");

// set attribute values
    // string primary name
    account["name"] = "Contoso";            
    // Boolean (Two option)
    account["creditonhold"] = false;
    // DateTime
    account["lastonholdtime"] = new DateTime(2017, 1, 1);
    // Double
    account["address1_latitude"] = 47.642311;
    account["address1_longitude"] = -122.136841;
    // Int
    account["numberofemployees"] = 500;
    // Money
    account["revenue"] = new Money(new decimal(5000000.00));
    // Picklist (Option set)
    account["accountcategorycode"] = new OptionSetValue(1); //Preferred customer
                
//Create the account
Guid accountid = svc.Create(account);

Early-bound

Early-bound programming requires that you first generate a set of classes based on the table and column definitions (entity and attribute metadata) for a specific environment using the code generation tool Power Platform CLI pac modelbuilder build command. More information: Generate classes for early-bound programming using the SDK for .NET

After generating early-bound classes using the code generation tool, you'll enjoy a better experience while you write code because classes and properties use the respective SchemaName property values:

Simply instantiate the class and let Visual Studio IntelliSense provide the names of properties and relationships.

The classes generated for early-bound programming can also include definitions for any custom actions that are defined for the environment. This provides you with a pair of request and response classes to use with these custom actions. More information: Custom Actions

Classes are generated using table definitions from a specific environment instance and each instance may have different tables and columns where these can change over time. You may need to write code to work for tables that aren't present when you generate the strongly typed classes.

Important

If you are using the OrganizationServiceProxy to provide the IOrganizationService methods you will use, you must call the OrganizationServiceProxy.EnableProxyTypes() method to enable early bound types.

Example

The following example creates an account using the early-bound style.

var account = new Account();
// set attribute values
    // string primary name
    account.Name = "Contoso";
    // Boolean (Two option)
    account.CreditOnHold = false;
    // DateTime
    account.LastOnHoldTime = new DateTime(2017, 1, 1);
    // Double
    account.Address1_Latitude = 47.642311;
    account.Address1_Longitude = -122.136841;
    // Int
    account.NumberOfEmployees = 500;
    // Money
    account.Revenue = new Money(new decimal(5000000.00));
    // Picklist (Option set)
    account.AccountCategoryCode = new OptionSetValue(1); //Preferred customer

//Create the account
Guid accountid = svc.Create(account);

Choose which style

Which programming style you choose to use is up to you. The following table provides the advantages and disadvantages for each.

Early-bound	Late-bound
You can verify entity, attribute, and relationship names at compile time	No compile time verification of entity, attribute, and relationship names
You must generate entity classes	You don't need to generate entity classes
Better IntelliSense support	Less IntelliSense support
Less code to write; code is more readable	More code to write; code is less readable
Very slightly less performant	Very slightly more performant

Mix early and late bound

Because all the generated classes inherit from the Entity class used with late-bound programming, you can work with entities, attributes, and relationships not defined within classes.

Examples

The following example shows one way to mix early and late binding methods using OrganizationServiceContext.

// Create an context object  
AWCServiceContext context = new AWCServiceContext(_serviceProxy);  
  
// Instantiate an account object using the Entity class.  
Entity testaccount = new Entity("account");  
  
// Set several attributes. For account, only the name is required.   
testaccount["name"] = "Fourth Coffee";  
testaccount["emailaddress1"] = "marshd@contoso.com";  
  
// Save the entity using the context object.  
context.AddToAccountSet(testaccount);  
context.SaveChanges();

If a custom attribute wasn't included in the generated classes, you can still use it.

var account = new Account();
// set attribute values
    // string primary name
    account.Name = "Contoso";
    // A custom boolean attribute not included in the generated classes.
    account["sample_customboolean"] = false;


//Create the account
Guid accountid = svc.Create(account);

Assign an early bound instance to a late bound instance

The following sample shows how to assign an early bound instance to a late bound instance.

Entity incident = ((Entity)context.InputParameters[ParameterName.Target]).ToEntity<Incident>();  
Task relatedEntity = new Task() { Id = this.TaskId };  
  
incident.RelatedEntities[new Relationship("Incident_Tasks")] =   
new EntityCollection(new Entity[] { relatedEntity.ToEntity<Entity>() });

Late-bound and early-bound programming using the SDK for .NET

Late-bound

Example

Early-bound

Example

Choose which style

Mix early and late bound

Examples

Assign an early bound instance to a late bound instance

See also

Feedback

Additional resources