FetchXML reports do not trigger RetrieveMultiple plugins in CRM 2011

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
Joseph Campbell

The CRM forums are a great resource for learning interesting solutions and problems in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

I read this interesting gotcha/CRM Quirk this week about a CRM developer who had written a plugin which was triggered on the RetrieveMultiple event on his custom entity. The user was wondering why his plugin was not being triggered when the user ran a report using FetchXML.

RetrieveMultiple Plugins, What, Why and How?

So you can have plugins which trigger on RetrieveMultiple for an entity. Some readers are thinking why would you want to do that?

Reasons like

Translate data held in the CRM database
Exclude data from RetrieveMultiple queries
Log RetrieveMultiple requests
Calculate some fields in the retrieve from other entities
Decrypting encrypted fields

There are lots of other reasons, but they give you an idea. The user wouldn’t even know a plugin had run because they would just receive the results as normal.

The retrieve multiple is triggered in CRM when the user

Runs an advanced find
User clicks on a view (e.g. active accounts)
Quick search
Associated views
Plugins doing retrieve multiples
Console apps doing retrieve multiples

What about reports and FetchXML

So why don’t reports and FetchXML trigger the RetrieveMultiple plugin

The answer was explained in this forum post answer by CRM legend David Jennaway who is a CRM MVP, when I was starting in CRM development David had a fantastic CRM blog which I followed avidly and still do, but but unfortunately for the CRM community David rarely writes any blog posts these days (2 post in 2014).

Reports do not trigger plugins. SQL reports bypass CRM completely, and Fetch reports also bypass the plugin pipeline

He also add this answer

Just to clarify the last post, in CRM 2011 fetch queries are submitted via the RetrieveMultiple message, whereas in CRM 4 they were submitted via the Fetch message and (bizarrely) you could handle them in plugins on the Execute message

This logically makes sense because SQL reports definitely would hit the plugin pipeline and I’m guessing FetchXML when run from reports must be run using a slightly different mechanism (I have no knowledge of this)

I’m not sure if this is the same in CRM 2013 but I’m guessing it’s probably going to be the same because I don’t think there have been changes in those areas of functionality.