Missing Components Error While Importing Dynamics CRM Managed Solutions

“Do the Right thing, in the First attempt”. This was advise of one my mentors which has helped me a lot to progress in my career. I always tend to follow the best practices in my work and stick to the recommended approach despite the fact that it is not always feasible. I have lost count of late sittings I have done to use Dynamics CRM Managed Solutions in my work (Sounds familiar? ) and some of these nights taught me a lot.

In one of my early works, I encountered the following scenario:
In my Development environment, I created a new Unmanaged Solution with a new publisher (to identify who made changes). I added some components to the solution.
While adding components I received the standard warning of “Missing components” to be added to the solution which I ignored. This was an expected action because my destination UAT environment already had the missing components so I was not expecting any dependency issue.
I exported my solution with the new publisher as a “Managed Solution”.
When I tried to import the managed solution in the UAT environment (in which already had all missing components), I received the below error.

After a some search, I learned the following: “The import of a managed solution will FAIL due to missing dependencies if imported solution publisher is different than the publisher who owns the missing components“. So you will have two options:

• Either add all missing components while you export your unmanaged solution as managed solution to ensure the platform does not try to find missing components from other solutions.
• Change the publisher of your unmanaged solution before export as managed solution and ensure that all missing components in your solution are under the same publisher name in your new environment.

Original post: http://dynamicsce212.blogspot.com/2019/04/missing-components-error-while.html