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We have an entity which holds 3 types of Records A, B, C. Record type A is the parent of B (each A can be the parent to multiple B records) and further B is the parent of C (each B can be the parent to multiple C records). On creation / update of every record C, CalculateCommercials plugin will run that will pull all the sibling C records under a given record B and aggregate / roll-up the totals and update that parent record B with those rolled-up sum / totals. Same thing happens on update of B record totals which will roll-up the totals to grand-parent A record. The problem here is, when we create/update multiple C records under a given parent B this will trigger multiple CalculateCommercials plugin instances which is a bit inefficient & resource intensive. Is there a better approach where we let the CalculateCommercials to trigger only once irrespective of the number of C records being created / updated?

For example, if we create / update 10 C records at a given time we want the CalculateCommercials plugin to run only once which will roll-up the totals to B and again only once to update A, instead of 10 times (currently its triggering 10 CalculateCommercials plugin instances to roll-up to B, which in-turn trigger another 10 more instances to update grand-parent record type C).

Sometimes this chain of auto-triggers resulting in the exceeding of 2 minute time limit for the plugin instance. Is there a better approach to simplify the rolling up of totals to parent B and then on to A?

Raghu
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A lot depends upon how the rollup fields are used, and their consistency requirements.

Simplest approach is to plan for eventual consistency rather than strict consistency. The update-grandchild plugin would merely mark a "dirty" field in the grandchild entity, which requires no additional DB locking. Separately, a scheduled workflow or Power Automate flow runs every 'N' minutes, which finds all the dirty grandchildren, updates their parents' rollup fields, and resets the dirty fields. Because this workflow is scheduled and nothing else takes a write lock on the rollup fields, there is little contention on the parent and grandparent records. However, it means that rollup values are always a few minutes out-of-date if the grandchildren are constantly changing.

D365 seems to implement a "rollup field" concept that does exactly this: https://www.encorebusiness.com/blog/rollup-fields-in-microsoft-dynamics-365-crm/ The scheduled task runs every hour by default, but can be configured by an admin.

To improve the update latency, you could make the flow on-demand or triggered by updates to the relevant grandchild fields, but have it check & update a "flow already triggered" table to ensure that multiple flow instances aren't trying to do the updates simultaneously. The "winning" instance of the flow sets the "running" flag, loops repeatedly until it finds no more dirty records, and then clears the "running" flag. The "losing" instances terminate immediately when they see that another instance is active.

This pattern requires a lot more care to handle potential race conditions related to records being marked dirty after the running flag is cleared, as well as transient errors that might terminate the flow before it completes. Again, a simple solution is to schedule a "sweeper" instance once per hour, or day.

If you need it to be strictly consistent, then this whitepaper might help: https://download.microsoft.com/download/D/6/6/D66E61BA-3D18-49E8-B042-8434E64FAFCA/ScalableDynamicsCRMCustomizations.docx It discusses the tradeoffs inherent in various locking and registration options for plugins.

If the rollup fields are rarely consumed, then it might be more efficient to recalculate the field only when a client requests that field while reading the parent or grandparent entity, using a separate plugin on those entities. You'd want to ensure that clients don't request that field unless they need it.

Jeff Roberts
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