Auditing CRM 2011 Entities - Deployment Issues

Question

I made few changes in DEV CRM 2011 server to audit changes in Entity and attributes, for this I enabled Auditing at Organization Level and then at entities level in DEV environment.

This is going to change Customizations.xml file, which will be part of solution export from this environment.

Now we deploy this Solution to another environment which is restricted and might not require these auditing, will it enable auditing by itself in the other environment (due to customizations.xml)?

Basically Entity and Field level auditing is added to Customizations.xml with IsAuditEnabled attribute in this xml. I am not sure about Organization level details are there or not? Do I need to change audit settings in DEV before deploying to another environment?

Thanks in advance, I hope I am clear in my query. Please let me know in case any more details are required.

Answer 1

It will enable Auditing. If you look at the customizations.xml file for the solution you will see that 1 is added to all the entities where auditing is enabled.

Even worse, if you don't have auditing enabled in dev and you do in production, publishing the dev solution in production will cause you to loose all the valuable auditing data you have collected so far.

To prevent the Dev audit settings from affecting production, search for all occurrences of

<IsAuditEnabled>1</IsAuditEnabled> and <IsAuditEnabled>0</IsAuditEnabled> 

in the customizations.xml file and comment them out.

This way the existing audit settings will be retained when you publish the new solution.