Where are the List Members of a Dynamic Marketing List?

In CRM 4.0 there was no concept of Dynamic Marketing List. We could create only static Marketing lists until CRM 2011. Now in CRM 2011 Microsoft has introduced the concept of Dynamic Marketing list. In Dynamic Marketing List the Marketing List Members are selected based on the critieria that is set for the Marketing lists. This means that each time you open a Marketing list the criteria is evaluated against the current database records and the list of members displayed at runtime based on the results of the query specified.

Recently we were required to read the Members of a Marketing list and while we could get the list of members for the Static Marketing list from the ListMember entitiy of Dynamics CRM. But when you try to look for List Members for a Dynamic List you wont find any results in there. Thats because as stated earlier, the members are added based on the evaluation of the query at runtime.

In case of Dynamic marketing list when we retrieve the Dynamic Marketing List we will get the FetchXML in the “query” field that contains the Fetch XML Query.

In the below given code we have read the Dynamic Marketing List. The query for the Marketing List members is stored as a FetchXML request in the “query” field of the Marketing List entity. For Static marketing List the query attribute would return null value.

We have to execute the query using the FetchExpression as given in the below code.

private void RetrieveMarketingListResult(IAsyncResult result)
{
try
{
//OrganizationResponse Response = ((IOrganizationService)result.AsyncState).EndExecute(result);
//Entity listResponse = (Entity)Response["Entity"];

string fetchXMLQuery = string.Empty;
OrganizationResponse response = ((IOrganizationService)result.AsyncState).EndExecute(result);
EntityCollection results = (EntityCollection)response["EntityCollection"];
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (Entity entity in results.Entities)
{

fetchXMLQuery = entity.GetAttributeValue("query");
sb.AppendLine("List Name = " + entity.GetAttributeValue("listname"));
}

FetchExpression query = new FetchExpression()
{
Query=fetchXMLQuery
};

OrganizationRequest request = new OrganizationRequest() { RequestName = "RetrieveMultiple" };

request["Query"] = query;

IOrganizationService service = SilverlightUtility.GetSoapService();

service.BeginExecute(request, new AsyncCallback(RetrieveViesResult), service);

}
catch (Exception ex)
{
this.ReportError(ex);
}
}

After executing the query we would get the collection.

NOTE: There are chances that the results of the FetchXML execution may not match what is actually displayed in CRM UI for a Dynamic Marketing List. One of the reasons is when adding marketing list members CRM only allows active records to be added as members. In case the FetchXML does not explicitly include the criteria for Active records selection the result would return active as well as inactive records. You will need to manually exclude the Inactive records from your execution process.