How do I remove Dynamics CRM sitemap customizations?

Question

I've got a managed plugin that I can install / uninstall from Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Within the plugin's customizations.xml I have included a small section of Sitemap customizations, particularly an additional group and added to the sidenav area.

The issue that I'm running into, however, is that the sitemap customizations do not get removed when I uninstall the plugin. The additional group remains as part of the sidenav area, though now it causes sitemap errors because the necessary webresources it uses are missing (they are removed during the plugin uninstall).

Are there any ways to force the sitemap to revert to default when I uninstall the plugin or possibly mark the customizations as specific to the plugin so they are removed on uninstall?

I could be wrong, but I think you have to correct the site map and then re-import it. Otherwise, the old site map stays, no matter if you uninstall your unmanaged solution or not. You might be able to play around with using Managed solutions if you really want the sitemap to work with uninstall. — Mike_Matthews_II

adner1 adner1 · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-25T17:23:42

Actually, according to the CRM 2011 SDK documentation the sitemap modification thas was part of the managed solution should automatically be removed from the system when the managed solution is removed. Quoted from the SDK doc:

When a solution is packaged as managed, the SiteMap XML is compared to the original SiteMap XML and any other customizations made to the SiteMap. Only the differences are included in the managed solution. These differences include items that are changed, moved, added or removed .... Later, if the managed solution is uninstalled, the SiteMap XML that was imported with the managed solution will be referenced to remove the changes introduced with that managed solution. A new active SiteMap is then calculated.

For example, the customization.xml of a solution containing just an added Group will contain XML similar to this:

<Group Id="TestGroup" IsProfile="0" ordinalvalue="6" solutionaction="Added">
          <Titles>
            <Title Title="Examplegroup" LCID="1033" />
          </Titles>
          <SubArea Id="new_webresource" PassParams="1" Url="$webresource:new_webresource" ordinalvalue="0">
            <Titles>
              <Title LCID="1033" Title="Example" />
            </Titles>
          </SubArea>
        </Group>

The solutionaction attribute instructs the system to remove the snippet of XML from the full customization.xml when the managed solution is removed. In short, it should behave the way that you want it to...

Of course, the above only applies to managed solutions.

That is doesn't work for you seems to indicate that the customization.xml of your system has somehow been corrupted. I would recommend exporting the sitemap, remove any reference to the erroneous elements, and re-import.

It should also be noted that you usually need to do a hard refresh of the web browser after publishing an update to the sitemap, in order for the removed navigation elements to go away. Otherwise it's easy to run into problems similar to the ones that you describe.

How do I remove Dynamics CRM sitemap customizations?

2 Answers