CRM 2011 Plugins: Welcome to transactions !

One of the thing I hate about CRM 4.0 plugins is the inability to automatically rollback actions when an exception occurs during a business process.

To illustrate this, imagine a plugin which creates a contract, then a line of contract. If the code throws an exception during the creation of the contract line, you need to take care yourself of deleting the contract that have been created: of course, you need the contract AND the contract line, not just the contract.

In CRM 2011, you can now register your plugin in new stage (see below). That means that you can register your plugin in a transaction (if using stage 20 and 40) and whenever you plugin throws an exception, every action done during the transaction will be rollback. In our previous example, that means tha the contract will be deleted automatically by the application.

Event	Stage Name	Stage Number	Description
Pre-Event	Pre-validation	10	Stage in the pipeline for plug-ins that are to execute before the main system operation. Plug-ins registered in this stage may execute outside the database transaction.
Pre-Event	Pre-operation	20	Stage in the pipeline for plug-ins that are to execute before the main system operation. Plug-ins registered in this stage are executed within the database transaction.
Post-Event	Post-operation	40	Stage in the pipeline for plug-ins which are to execute after the main operation. Plug-ins registered in this stage are executed within the database transaction.
Post-Event	Post-operation	50	Stage in the pipeline for plug-ins which are to execute after the main operation. Plug-ins registered in this stage may execute outside the database transaction. This stage only supports Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 based plug-ins.

 

More informations on the SDK page :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg327941.aspx