Limit the registration of plug-ins for Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple messages

Category: Performance

Impact potential: Medium

Symptoms

Adding synchronous plug-in logic to the Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple message events can result in:

• Unresponsive model-driven apps
• Slow client interactions
• The browser stops responding

Guidance

Evaluate the design of solutions that include plug-ins registered for the Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple messages. In general, it isn't recommended to register plug-ins for these messages due to the risks associated with slowing down the requests to return an entity record or records from various entry points. However, it might be appropriate for the design of your application. An example of a common application would be the injection of more filter criteria to a specific existing query. This approach allows a solution to compensate for what can't be done in the user interface for views. The view designer can only support a certain depth of complexity and then other options must be employed to augment the results or the query.

If it's an appropriate solution, then follow these tips to minimize the impact to the environment:

• Include conditions in the plug-in code to quickly check if the targeted logic needs to be performed. If it doesn't, then return quickly, refraining from executing unnecessary extra steps that delay returning the data to the caller.

• Avoid including long running tasks, especially nondeterministic tasks, such as the invocation of external service calls or complex queries to Dataverse.

• Limit or avoid querying for more data from Microsoft Dataverse.

Virtual Entities

Most commonly Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple are called within plug-ins to retrieve data from external sources. The data from the external sources are rendered within Power Apps or used to work/manipulate existing data. Dataverse virtual tables allow integration of data residing in external systems by seamlessly representing that data as tables in Power Apps, without replication of data and often without custom coding.

Retrieve Caution

Dataverse triggers at least two Retrieve messages for each entity form load. One retrieve contains limited attributes, which can vary by entity, and subsequent calls include more attributes. If you expect a single action to occur during the loading of a form, then don't rely strictly on the trigger of a Retrieve message.

Additional information

The Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple messages are two of the most frequently processed messages. The Retrieve message is triggered when opening up an entity form or when an entity is being accessed using the Retrieve operation in one of the service endpoints. RetrieveMultiple is triggered due to various actions in the application and service endpoints, for example, when populating a grid in the user interface. Adding synchronous plug-in logic to these message events can cause slowness.

See also

Performance Optimizations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
Create and edit virtual entities that contain data from an external data source