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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Solution/version control
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Solution/version control

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Posted on by Jeroen J 12

Hey guys,

I can't imagine I'm the only one facing this challenge (CRM 2016 on premise situation). Looking for a way to keep track on the amount of imported solutions. I'd like to:

  1. Save each and every imported .zip solution somewhere (preferably in CRM database for analysis purposes)
  2. See the delta between now and the to be imported solution. Less important for now.

Because of the ongoing flow of imports/changes, it's close to not doable to document every change manually.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for thinking along with me, regards,

Jeroen

*This post is locked for comments

I have the same question (0)
  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at

    CRM could potentially change a lot of different things when importing a solution. From XML changes to new data tables and relationship references. I guess one possible way would be to have

    1. Perform SQL Full Backup

    2. Import

    3. Perform SQL Differential Backup

    Note that you don't want to change ANYTHING, not even record changes, in between the 2 backups. Probably not the most optimal idea out there.

  • David Jennaway Profile Picture
    David Jennaway 14,065 on at

    A key consideration is whether you use managed or unmanaged solutions to deploy to the production environment. If you use managed solutions then you will be able to identify which solution a component originated in, whereas with unmanaged solutions you don't have this information. Also, with managed solutions you can prevent direct modification of components in the production environment.

    Using patches should also help control what is included in each import, though this does depend on the developer only including the necessary changes in the patch prior to export

  • Jeroen J Profile Picture
    Jeroen J 12 on at

    Those are good questions, David.

    My organization hasn't made the step up to managed solutions yet (fear of change, probably). Main reason is that every now and then, we want to clone production to acceptance and development so we can be testing against fresh data. If solutions in production are managed, well, I guess we can actually fire our developers then :)

    So, unmanaged it is for now, even though from a maintenance and security perspective I'd love to start using managed solutions.

    Using patches hasn't enchanted me yet, mainly because I don't like to see my list of solutions explode if every solution gets 4/5/6 patches that come with it. What would be the big advantage?

  • David Jennaway Profile Picture
    David Jennaway 14,065 on at

    If you use managed solutions, then you need a minimum of 3 environments to do it properly:

    • Development, where you make the unmanaged changes
    • Test / Acceptance, which should be as close to Production as possible, so should have managed solutions
    • Production, which has managed solutions

    With this, you can clone Production to Test / Acceptance, but can't clone to Development.

    Re patches, you typically deploy more often and in more granular fashion. You can see that as a benefit (because each deployment is smaller, and so easier to identify what changes have been made), or a drawback (because you typically have more deployments). Note that you can clone to solution to create a new baseline version that rolls up the previous patches, so you don't need to keep a large set of patches, but just those since the last solution version

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