Dynamics CRM: Manage Solutions

Santosh BhagatDyn365CE6 years ago6 Views

People says, “Necessity is the mother of invention”.
But I think “Laziness also initiator of invention”. 😊

In CRM as a developer
we always played with Solution. We create new solution to manages our
development and to transfer our work from Dev to Test instance etc. Solution
also required for marketplace package movement.

After CRM 2016, Microsoft also added two new option in
Solution: –

Clone
a patch– To make small change related to parent solution.

Clone
Solution– To merge current solution and patch in single updated
solution. And remove previous one.

But here I am not discussing about these features because you
will find some good materials related to these new features in google.

Use
Cases: –

When I was working for one of my project I have a
solution more than 400 components. And I need to create a solution with 300 components
of that solution. You could say Clone a patch might work but not in my case
because it creates dependency on parent solution and create a blank solution.

In one of another project I had a managed
solution in Production. In development Organization have unmanaged solution which
played by lot of team members, as we developer do always.😉 We need an unmanaged
solution from that managed solution. But Microsoft do not give any feature for this.

I need to export list you all solutions. But no
option found either in advance find or in solution view.

While tackle with these situation, I was thinking there
should be something a single click option to do so.

Now I started developing a XrmToolbox plugin to help me. Today I am deploying my Plugin for all developers and soon it will be available in XRMToolbox also.

Features
of this Plugin.

Retrieve all Solutions
Make a Copy of Solution
Delete Solution
Export Solution to folder
Export Solution list to excel
Publish All Customization.

Download XRMToolBox from given URL and install. https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/

Install Managed Solution Plugin in your XRMTollBox using
plugin store.

If you are not able to find Manage Solution plugin.

Download Plugin

Install in XRMToolBox by clicking Settings->Path->Storage
folder->Plugin folder.

Copy assembly in Plugin folder.

Connect your organization and open plugin Managed Solution.

Click on “Retrieve Solution”. Now you will see list of all solutions
and their information.

Select any managed or unmanaged solution to make a copy of
it. Select solution and click on “Make a copy” button. Before creating a copy,
you need to provide new solution name.

It will create a copy of your solution with all source
solution component.

To Delete any solution, select your solution and click on “Delete
Solution” button.

To Publish all customization, click on “Publish All
Customization” button.

To export all solutions list, click on “Export Grid” button
provide your location to store solution excel sheet. Make sure you have MS
office preinstall to use this option.

To export any unmanaged solution, select unmanaged solution
and click on “Export Solution” and it open a new form. Fill required details in
new form and click “Export” button.