usually when I am first developing some code in a plugin I will select all columns in the query
e.g.
account Account= (account)service.Retrieve(account.EntityLogicalName, id, new ColumnSet(true));
Once I know the code is working I will change this to pass only retrieve the fields I need because this makes the code run quicker and it’s basically just lazy to select all the columns
I usually pass in a list
List<string> fields = new List<string> { “name”, “accountnumber”, “creditlimit” };
and set that to the columns.
Today I had to do this to fix a puzzling problem I was having. My CRM was acting a bit wierd, I got a few timeouts when just viewing a custom entity form. I couldn’t understand this at all because there wasn’t loads of field on the entity and there also wasn’t a lot of records so there was no reason I could the SQL should be running slow.
On the custom entity I did have a workflow which checked if certain fields changed and if they did it would set some fields on another entity.
I also had a plugin which was kicked off on the update event and in this plugin it was retrieving all the custom entity fields and then doing an update.
What was happening is I somehow triggered a loop which the workflow ran and this kicked off the update plugin, my criteria on running the update plugin were always being hit and then I was saving the whole record. This triggered the plugin. I ended up with initially 200 workflows had been kicked off for my custom entity.
Even after I fixed the criteria to run only when certain fields had been changed my workflow was still firing a few times.
This was valid because the custom entity was correctly being updated by the plugin but because I had retrieved all the fields the workflow was being triggered, this was not correct because the fields the workflow was monitoring were not actually have any data changed.
So I modified my code to only select the fields I was going to check/change and after I had done this the workflow stopped getting triggered incorrectly and a bonus my code ran a lot quicker.
Perhaps there is a lesson here for me, get the code selecting the correct fields from the start and don’t be lazy with retrieving and writing all the fields of an entity.
Hosk's Dynamic Blog 
another way to avoid the problem of trigger updates on all the fields, is to ‘new’up a new instance of the entity and just set the fields you want to change, then save that.
Here is some pseduo C# code;
var acct = new Account
{
AccountId = id,
Name = “my new name”
};
OrganizationService.Update(acct);
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Hi Hosk, you can also prevent plugin loops by checking the IExecutionContext’s depth. In most of my plugins I simply return if it is nested too deep.
e.g.
IExecutionContext context = executionContext.GetExtension();
if (context.Depth > 1)
{
// Avoid infinite loop when updating SLA’s
return;
}
Hope this helps.
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