CRM Delete Plugin Message - Relationship record deletion

When  you are deleting a record in CRM you might have had a requirement to delete it's relationships as well with other records. How would you do this?

Is it Pre Delete message in CRM that would work with this or Post Delete message?

The answer in none of them would work. When the plugin starts executing any of the previous messages then by that time the deleted records would have dropped all the relationships with other records. This means you are no longer able to query the related data.

So is there a way to achieve this, and the answer is Yes, there is.

You can use pre valiation before deletion to be executed and this would do the trick. Please note the message pipeline for this is 10.

You can achieve what we set to achieve from this message when a record is deleted.

Activity Feeds CRM Solution

Earlier when we wanted to get this solution we were able to go to the market place for CRM and download this. However this is no longer possible.

How can we update this to the latest version?

Many of you may know it, this is being shipped with the update rollups now.  But how to get this from the update rollup.

After downloading the update rollup, you need to change the extension of that from .exe. to .zip and extract the files. In the extracted files you would be able to see the update activity feed zip file :).

Retrieving a full record in CRM

When you try retrieve a full record from CRM using all columns = true would you be getting all the columns?

We recently checked this for one of our projects and strangely we were not getting all the custom fields with the result set. we were only getting a number of columns,

Then we tried another record from the same entity. The number of columns that retrieved was more that the previous occasion. However the columns that we received had a value assigned to each of them. 

So, it seems CRM when retrieving data only sends of the columns that have values assigned to them.