Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Deleting orphaned components from a managed solution

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Posted on by Antbutcher

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Hi Guys,

I have a quick question on how you guys have handled this scenario in the past.

We have entities and fields that have been added into our unmanaged solution, and subsequently pushed live in a managed solution.

One of our developers has since decided these entities and fields are not needed and deleted them from our unmanaged solution.

As solutions only allow edits and creations we are left with a number of orphaned fields and entities in our live managed solution, just wonder how you guys have dealt with these in the past.

Only solution I can think of without un-installing the solution and loosing data is to:

1.) Import the same managed solution again with a different name

2.) Un-install the old managed solution.

Before doing this I will obviously test this in a development environment but I thought it was worth asking the question to get other peoples opinions on this.

Thanks in advance

Antony

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Deepesh161 6,317 on at

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You need to utilize holding solution concept if you want to preserve your data as well.

community.dynamics.com/.../how-to-delete-an-old-component-from-your-managed-solution-in-crm-2011-2013

Make sure you test in DEV first.

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Antbutcher 387 on at

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thanks Deepesh that really helpful, will certainly be testing in our dev environment first.

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Sukh Gill 967 on at

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What version of CRM are you currently using? I agree with Deepesh that you would need to use the holding solution concept. I have done this many times and works however I know some users are nervous of this as requires a few manual steps.

With CRM 2016 this can now be accomplished during a solution import and does not require any manual steps. When you import a managed solution which is an update to an existing solution, you now get the option for 'Stage for Upgrage' as shown in screenshot below:

When this is selected, the solution is imported into the target environment and creates a new solution, name is appended with _upgrade as shown below:

You can then click on 'Apply Solution Upgrade' which will then remove the original solution 'Base' and then rename the _Upgrade solution back to its original name.

As you can see this is now an easier way to remove solution components from a Production environment.

Thanks
Sukh

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Sukh Gill 967 on at

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Apologies for some reason my screenshots are not being displayed

EDIT: Updated post to show screenshots

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Antbutcher 387 on at

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Thanks for your reply Sukh, that is very useful to know about the solution built into CRM 2016, currently we are on CRM 2015 but I am sure we will be upgrading some point this year.

I am currently on testing the holding solution method, however, came across an issue after importing the holding solution and removing the existing solution, when trying to import the final final solution I get an error regarding reports.

"Cannot update a report from a template if the report was not created from a template"

Same issue that;s been reported here, the report it complains about actually runs fine in the development environment. Anyone come across this before?

community.dynamics.com/.../150777

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