There’s a feature of Dynamics CRM (that’s been in the product since version 3, I believe) that actually lives outside of the “front-and-center” security model that you normally think of with Dynamics CRM security roles.

I’m talking about the cascading functionality defined in entity relationships. Specifically, there is a cascading property called “Reparent.” There’s an old (but still relevant) article here about how this reparent functionality works. As this article explains, if you have a 1:N relationship between accounts and opportunities, and in this relationship, you have set the “reparent” property to “cascade all,” this means that the owner of an account (Acme INC) will see any opportunities created with Acme INC as the related account, and any opportunities whose related account is updated to be Acme INC.

When does “Reparent” take effect?

To go a bit deeper though, it’s important to understand exactly when this reparent property comes into play. If…

This post explains how the QueryExpression class can be used in conjunction with IOrganizationService.RetrieveMultiple() in CRM 2013 to retrieve related records for an entity in an N:N relationship. This is something that I could not find much documentation on, and it is not very straightforward – at least for someone starting out in CRM dev.

Scenario

I have two custom entities that have an N:N relationship between them: Course (logical name ng_course) and Subject (logical name ng_subject). The relationship is named ng_course_subject. The query that I need to write is to retrieve all Subjects assigned to a given Course.

Understanding QueryExpression and LinkEntity

The QueryExpression class is where you define your query. You can learn more about this class here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.xrm.sdk.query.queryexpression(v=crm.6).aspx.

The key property of this class that enables us to retrieve the related records is the LinkEntities property, which is a collection of LinkEntity objects. Essentially LinkEntity