Howdy everyone! It's been a while (again) since I've been able to write a blog post. I've been focused on some large projects at work, as well as expanded my family by one (and am now severely outnumbered with girls).
Recently we came across an issue where Output Parameters from an action inside of a Dataverse environment wouldn't be populated when retrieving them in a JavaScript (JS) function. Everything seemed to be setup correctly in regards to the parameters being set as output, the plugin setting the values, and the JS request reading the returned parameters. My first thought was to check the plugin to make sure that the parameters were, in fact, being set properly. Investigating the trace statements of the Plugin Trace Logs it was confirmed that the Output Parameters were being set properly and returned within the plugin, however, those same values were not coming across into the JS request and instead showing blank/default/null values.
After some investigation, it was discovered that the plugin had been registered as Asynchronous rather than Synchronous by accident, which would totally explain why the Output Parameters were not being retrieved properly. Most likely the plugin was setting the values but the JS function was trying to retrieve those same values prior to them being set.
Even though this issue required a minor resolution (updating the plugin registration to be synchronous), the cause of the issue could have been easily missed and caused a lot of headaches. Thankfully this was solved quickly and we were able to verify that the values set on the Output Parameters were correctly being retrieved in the JS request one registering the plugin as synchronous!