Dynamics crm 2016 gave us a revolutionary option to work
with solutions more granularly, option for true inheritance from managed
solutions, build-in holding solution option etc.
In the same time
some old “diseases” are still there. Managing dev and QA instances, I’ve found
an issue that appears as a generic error in log file and cannot be tracked with
tracer or event viewer.
By my experience, the issue may happen if:
1.
You deleted a relationship and then created a
field with same name in the same entity.
2.
You deleted a local option set field and created
a field based on global option set in the same entity with the same name.
The symptom of those two issues will appear in
the target crm instance in the import log file: “The content of the import file is not valid. You must
select a text file”. The fix is to make manual changes
to target. In case you cannot make manual changes due to managed nature of
target solution you might wish to create a new crm instance and import solution
from the source environment. And here you may find that solution from source
crm cannot be imported and it looks just like this:
It means your source crm instance is corrupted. I couldn’t
identify the source of issue and had no time to wait for MS investigation, that
is definitely a good option. The
workaround I found published below. A prerequisite for the workaround is
backups existence.
Details:
Environment tested: crm 2015 SP1, crm 2016 Update 0.1
and 1.0.
Issue: Solution source dynamics crm instance is corrupted
Reason: New field created with same name in the same entity but with a
different type than the deleted one.
Symptoms: Can export and import solution without issues,
but cannot import it into new environment
Error: The import of solution: SolutionName failed.
No errors
in trace or event viewer. Import log file contains a generic error message.
Workaround solution:
a. If
don’t have solution backups, then you’re done. I have nothing for this case.
Call MS support.
b. If
you do have backups:
-
Pinpoint the issue: create a new instance (let’s
call it X), import your backups to a new instance, one by one, keep it by descending
solution version (build, release or whatever).
-
Assume you found the max version you can import.
Start import the follow versions, by ascending, till the last one. It must work.
-
Now you got the instance X with latest solution.
Test:
-
Create a new crm instance (let’s call it Y).
-
Get latest crm solution from the X.
-
Try to import it to Y. No import issues means workaround worked for you.
If it worked you can have X crm instance as your new source crm. Migrate you master data if needed.
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