Question

Background (ie what the heck is a relative complement?)

Relative Complement

What I’m trying to do

Let’s say I’ve got a custom Vehicle entity that has a VehicleType option set that is either “Car”, or “Truck”. There is a 1 to many relationship between Contact and Vehicle (ie. ContactId is on the vehicle entity). How do I write an XRM query (Linq To CRM, QueryExpression, fetch Xml, whatever) that returns the contacts with only cars?

Answer 1

In order to order to perform a true Relative Complement Query you need to be able to perform a subquery.

Your query would basically say give me all the contacts with cars, and then, within those results, remove any contacts that have a vehicle that isn’t a car. This is what the SQL in @JasonKoopmans answer does. Unfortunetly, CRM does not support SubQueries.

Therefore, the only way to achieve this is to either perform the sub query on the client side, as I resorted to doing, or storing the results of what would be the subquery in a manner that can be accessed through the main query (ie storing counts on the contact entity).

You could theoretically do this “on the fly” by making a SubQueryResult entity that stores a ContactId, and SubQueryId. You’d first pull back the contacts that have at least 1 car, and create a SubQueryResult record for each record, with it’s contactId, and a single SubQueryId that is generated client side to tie them all together.

Then you’d do another query that says give me all the contacts that are in this SubQueryResult with this SubQueryId, that do not have any vehicles that aren’t cars.

I could only assume that this wouldn’t be any more efficient than performing the two separate queries and performing the filter client side. Although with the new ExecuteMultipleRequests in the new CRM release, it may be close.