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(Preview) Power Pages ALM using solutions
In one of my articles, I’ve explained Power Pages ALM using PAC CLI.
With this new preview feature Using solutions with Power Pages allows you to contain and transport website configurations using standard Power Platform solution concepts.
Feature Capabilities:
This feature includes the following capabilities:
- Solution explorer embedded experience in Power Pages.
- Add site(s) to a solution and export/import across environments.
- Ability to add newly added artifacts on an incremental basis.
- Use PAC CLI solution command with Power Pages.
Enable this preview feature on Environment:
You’ll first need to enable the enhanced data model on your Power Platform environment before being able to provision a website utilizing the enhanced data model.
- Connect to Power Platform Admin Center and select the Environment.
- Click on ‘Power Pages Sites’.
- Select the Upgrade to modern data model for new sites switch from the tool bar as highlighted below.
- Refer this article for more details.
🙂
D 365 Managed Solutions – Delete Components from target instance using ‘Stage for Upgrade’ option
Assume that you have exported and imported a Managed Solution ‘A’ from DEV to TEST. The solution ‘A’ has 2 entities (E1 and E2) and got imported to Test instance.
Now, because of a change in requirement, you no longer required E2 entity and need to delete that from TEST instance.
How would you delete E2 using Solutions approach?
With ‘Upgrade Solution’ behavior of ‘Managed Solution’ (Refer flow below), solution components only gets updated but not the deletion of the components.
And the answer to this is ‘Stage for Upgrade’ option of ‘Managed Solutions’.
Lets take following scenario to understand it better
- DEV instance has an entity ‘Interest Rate’
- Export a Managed solution with ‘Interest Rate’ entity from DEV and import to TEST.
- Delete the ‘Interest Rate’ entity from DEV
- Prepare a Managed solution and import to TEST using ‘Stage for Upgrade’ option.
- ‘Interest Rate’ entity should get deleted from TEST
Below is my TEST instance which has managed solution by name ‘Loan Management’ got installed with ‘Interest Rate’ entity.
Steps to use ‘Stage for Upgrade’ option:
Below are the usage steps of ‘Stage for Upgrade’ option.
Export Solution from DEV:
- Connect to the DEV instance and delete the ‘Interest Rate’ entity.
- Increase the version number of the ‘Loan Management’ Solution and export as Managed Solution.
Import Solution to TEST:
- Connect to TEST instance and click on ‘Import’ solution and make sure versions are different.
- Click ‘Next’
- Select ‘Stage for Upgrade’ checkbox and click ‘Import’
- Up on successful import, As a last step, you would get ‘Apply Solution Upgrade’.
- Don’t click the ‘Apply Solution Upgrade’ yet as we need to check few things.
- Note: You can always click ‘Apply Solution Upgrade’ and complete the upgrade. I refrained to do as I want to explain more.
- Close the ‘Import Solution’ wizard.
- Now on TEST instance, go to Advanced Find -> Interest Rate and you will still get the entity and data. Which means the Upgrade hasn’t happen yet.
- Lets complete the Upgrade by go to Settings -> Solutions and you will see 2 solutions
- Solution with ‘_Upgrade’ is Stage solution.
- Select the old solution (i.e., Solution with no ‘_Upgrade’) and click on ‘Apply Solution Upgrade’.
- The process takes time and once completed you would see a single solution with increase in version.
- Now, go to Advanced Find -> Interest Rate and you will not get the entity and data.
Refer this White Paper for more details on Solution Life Cycle Management.
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D365 – How to turn On/Off ‘Unified Interface Only mode’
Today, I subscribed to my new D365 30 days trail and noticed the ‘Sales’ web Application opening up in ‘Unified Interface’ mode rather than in Classic web mode by default.
When noticed, the URL of the Dynamics landing page (My Apps) has a parameter forceUCI=1
It seems that Unified Interface ONLY mode has been implied on my new instance.
What is Unified Interface Only mode?
- As per the documentation, Microsoft product team wants us to adopt to UCI (Unified Client Interface), to provide superior performance and usability.
- All the new Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement environments (instances) and Common Data Service environments, will be provisioned in Unified Interface Only mode.
Enable/Disable Unified Interface Only mode:
- To Enable/Disable Unified Interface Only mode, navigate to ‘Settings’ tab by clicking on ‘Advanced Settings’ from the ribbon
.
- Open Settings -> Administration -> System Settings
- Select the option under ‘Use the new Unified Interface only (recommended)’ section.
Accessing the legacy web client app:
- The legacy web client app, also known as Dynamics 365 – custom, is hidden from end users when a new environment is provisioned.
- It is always visible to those with System Administrator and System Customizer roles, and to other custom roles with similar privileges.
- To enable the Legacy App to non-admin users,
- Go to Settings > Administration > System Settings > General tab. Under Show legacy Dynamics 365 – custom app, select Yes for Show this app to all users, not just administrators.
- In the Power Platform Admin center, go to Environments and select an environment. Go to Settings > Behavior > Interface settings and then turn on Show legacy app to everyone, not just admins.
- Note:
- When ‘Unified Interface Only mode’ is enabled, Dynamics 365 – custom opens in Unified Interface and not in the legacy web client.
- Legacy app opens only If users only have access to the Dynamics 365 – custom app and no other model-driven apps.
🙂
Merging solutions in CRM 2011
Imagine you have 2 developers (Dev 1 & Dev 2) in your team working on 2 different organizations and 2 solutions, at the time of every release, you need to merge the components of both developers in to 1 solution.
One way is
- Import Dev 1 & Dev 2 solutions in to another new organization.
- Create a new solution and add the components of both solutions manually
- This is easy if Dev 1 & Dev 2 solutions has less components.
What if the components are huge? you need to manually pick and add components both solutions in to a single solution or
Another way of merging solutions
- Export & Save the both Dev 1 & Dev 2 solutions
- Extract the saved solution .zip folders
- Open “Solution.xml” files in both solutions in a notepad
Solution components
- In the <UniqueName> node, provide same unique name in both “Solution.xml” files
SolutionXml file
- Import them back to new a organization
- After the import, we get a new merged solution.
- This is easier way of merging if the solutions has lot of components
Refer below MSDN video for more details
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Solution import error in CRM 2011
Hi,
Solution import error
Sometimes you may get above error screen, when you try to import the “Solution”.
Reason:-
- Let’s assume you have a solution “XYZ.zip” with 3 files (i.e., [Content_Types].xml, Customizations.xml & Solution.xml)
- Extract the “XYZ.zip” to “XYZ_new” folder
- Do some customization changes (i.e., Add few buttons to Ribbon) to “Customizations.xml”
- Save the changes
- Zip the “XYZ_new” folder to “XYZ_new.zip”
- Try to Import the “XYZ_new.zip” as solution and you would get “Import solution error”
Fix:-
- Always zip the files from root level not from folder level
- i.e., When you make changes to solution files (Refer step 3 & 4) don’t zip “XYZ_new” folder, instead follow this step
- open “XYZ_new” folder and select files (Ctrl + A) and zip the files to “XYZ_new.zip”
- Import the zip
- Get the “Imported successfully” message
Hope it helps 🙂
Rajeev Pentyala - Microsoft Power Platform 