The Dynamics CRM Async Server is a great mechanism to host integrations to external systems without affecting the responsiveness of the user interface. Once such example is calling SharePoint as I describe in my series – SharePoint Integration Reloaded.
A draw back of this approach (compared to using an integration technology such as BizTalk) is that any exceptions thrown during the integration will simply fail the workflow job with no retries. You might already know that the Async Server does in fact have a retry mechanism built in as described by this excellent post from the archives - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2009/03/25/when-do-asynchronous-jobs-fail-suspend-or-retry.aspx. As you'll see from this article there are some built in exceptions where CRM will automatically retry a number of times as defined by the 'AsyncMaximumRetries' deployment property. The interval between these retries is defined by the 'AsyncRetryBackoffRate' property.
So how can we make use of this retry mechanism with our custom code?
There is an undocumented and unsupported way of using this retry mechanism in your custom workflow activities. I first used this technique back in the CRM 4.0 days and I'm pleased to report that it still works with CRM 2015!
Although unsupported, the worst that could happen is that the workflow would stop retrying in future version of Dynamics CRM and revert to simply reporting the exception. However it still wouldn't be a good idea to rely on this functionality for mission critical operations.
So…plz show me the codez…
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | catch (Exception ex)
{
OrganizationServiceFault fault = new OrganizationServiceFault();
fault.ErrorCode = -2147204346;
fault.Message = ex.ToString();
var networkException = new FaultException(fault);
throw networkException;
}
|
When an exception is thrown by your custom workflow activity you'll see the workflow enter into a 'Waiting' state and the 'Postpone until' attribute will be set to the time when the retry will take place. Once the maximum number of retries has been performed, it will enter the 'Failed' status.
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You can use this technique to ensure that any temporary integration failures such as service connectivity issues will be dealt with by a graceful retry loop. It only remains to ensure that you before throwing the exception you rollback any operations performed already by your code (such as creating records) so that your retries will not create duplicate records.
Hope this helps!
@ScottDurow