Working with Solution Components Overview

In this topic, we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into working with solution components in the context of your project solution. We’ll talk about adding new items, removing items, as well as working with required components for the dependencies of your items that you have in your solution. When making changes or creating new components, you should always start from within the custom solution you created for your project. You can also go to the default solution, which I’m showing here, which will list all the existing components that are in your environment. It’s important because you don’t want to recreate something that might already exist in your environment. You can also find these doing the Add Existing.

They’ll show up on the list under the different categories that you can use for Add Existing. Now, let’s talk a little bit about adding new items. New items can be added by going to the Plus New. You’ll notice from the menu option, you can add everything from Apps, Dashboard, Entities, Flow, Processes. And then the other category is kind of a catchall for all the other solution component types that aren’t listed above. In addition to Add New, which is only for new components, you can use Add Existing. What Add Existing does is allow you to add existing solution components that are in a different solution. Could be in default.

Could be from a managed solution, like Account or Opportunity, that comes from the Sales application. Let’s say, for example, that I wanted to add a field to the Opportunity entity that was custom for my particular use of Dynamics 365 for Sales. What I would do is first instal the Dynamics 365 for Sales application. I would then create my custom solution. I would come in, here do an Add Existing. Choose the entity as the type. Pick the opportunity entity. And then it would allow me to go through selecting for that entity what components I want to include on it. This is where we have the Include All Components as well as Include All Metadata.

We’ll talk about what happens as we dive deeper in this topic when you select those. But for now, what you would do is do the Select Components. And let’s say I want to change one of the forms. I would include only that form when I was going through and Adding Existing. Add Existing is how you bring in those existing assets. You can remove items that you created or that are still in the unmanaged layer. Remember, we’ll talk more about the different layers as we go through this topic. But think about it this way. If you got the entity from something like Dynamics 365 for Sales, you aren’t able to delete that item. You are only able to remove it.

That’s why there’s two options on the Remove menu– Remove From This Solution or Delete From This Environment. You want to be real careful that you choose the right thing. Remove From This Solution simply removes the reference to that component, and it doesn’t include it any more in what you deploy. Delete From This Environment will attempt to physically delete the entity or other component from your environment. And there is no Undo button for undoing that. That includes removing data that goes along with the entity. Or if it’s a field, it would remove the field and the data for that field. You will notice that the Delete From This Environment is disabled for some items that you aren’t able to delete.

For example, go back to my example of the opportunity entity that comes from Dynamics 365 for Sales. Because that’s from another solution that I’m dependent on, it’s not going to allow me to delete from this environment. The only way I would delete that entity from the environment would be to uninstall the solution for that application that contained the entity from the environment. Now, previously we’ve talked about the Showed Dependencies option that you can turn on for a particular solution component. And it will show you a list of things that component depends on– the required components. In this case, it depends on the Active Device Orders view as well as the Device Order entity.

Now, I could go in and do Add Existing and add those individually into my solution. And that would be one way to resolve the dependencies I have. So when I went to import into another environment, I didn’t get an error on Import saying I was missing something in that environment. The other option I have is I could select the item, in this case Device Ordering Overview– it’s a dashboard– and click the Add Required Components button. What that would do is the system would automatically look at what the required components are and add those into my solution for me.