Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

What if I have multiple relationships between my entities, how CRM handles multiple “Relationship Behaviors” (i.e., for example Parental & Referential)

Let’s consider this scenario,

• I have 2 custom entities “Customer” & “Bike” and my requirement is a customer should possess multiple bikes
• I created a 1:N relationship with “Type Of Behavior = Parental” between “Customer” & “Bike”

Parental Behavior

• Since the relationship behavior is “Parental”
  • If I Delete a “Customer” record, all associated “Bikes” get deleted (i.e., Because of ‘Cascade All’ Delete)
  • If I Assign a “Customer” to user X, all associated “Bikes” owner change to user X (i.e., ‘Cascade All’ Assign)

Now, just to my curiosity

• I created another 1:N relationship with “Type Of Behavior = Referential Restrict Delete” between “Customer” & “Bike”

Referential Restrict Behavior

• Since relationship behavior is “Referential Restrict Delete”
  • I cannot delete a “Customer” record, If its associated with “Bikes” records (i.e., Because of ‘Restrict’ Delete)
  • If I Assign a “Customer” to user X, all associated “Bikes” owner does not change (i.e., ‘Cascade None’ Assign)

Now if you see the “1:N relationships” of “Customer“, it will have 2 relationships as below

Multiple Relationships

Let’s try Delete & Assign scenarios and see how CRM application handles Parental & Referential behaviors

Delete Scenario

• I have a customer “Test” with 2 bikes
• Now, lets try to delete customer “Test” and see which of two behaviors (i.e., “Parental” or “Referential Restrict Delete”) applies
• Here I got “Restrict Delete” validation message, so “Referential Restrict Delete” behavior take precedence

Could not delete

Assign Scenario

• When I change the ownership of “Test”
• All my “Bikes” ownership changed to new owner of customer “Test”, so “Parental” behavior take precedence

Conclusion

• In these scenarios, CRM always unions, so in our scenario when I have “Parental” & “Referential Restrict Delete”
  • In case of Delete “Cascade All” union “Restrict”, so it restricted the delete
  • In case of Assign “Cascade All” union “Cascade None” = Cascade All, so all associated records ownership also change

🙂