Custom entities not shown in default solution screen - Dynamics CRM 2013

Question

I've come across this really strange scenario that I'm hoping that someone else has come across (best scenario) or perhaps that someone with a lot of CRM experience can perhaps point me in the direction of where to look for a possible solution. I cant seem to find anything online thats close to this issue.

We have 4 environments : DEV, DEV-IST, UAT and PreProd. We progress CRM deployments in the following order: DEV -> DEV-IST -> UAT -> PreProd. We havent gone live with our development and hence I've not included Production.

We progress CRM Deployments using the following steps.

1. Go to DEV.

2. Export any unmanaged solutions to managed solutions. We then copy those managed solutions into the 'PkgFolder' of the package deployer.

3. We then take a backup of the DEV-IST CRM (Organisation A) database and restore it to the DEV database server as (Organisation A). We then run the package deployer on Organisation A so that it now has all the changes that we'd made in development. Before we do anything further, we login to Organisation A and go to the following screen: Home -> Settings -> Customisations -> Customize the System. I can see under the Entities node all the custom entities.

4. I now backup Organisation A (which now includes my Dev updates) and copy the backup file to the DEV-IST database server.

5. I first go to Deployment Manager on DEV-IST and disable the organisation and then delete it.

6. Now I go to the SQL Database for DEV-IST and restore the backup from step 4 above and overwrite the Organisation A database.

7. I go back into Deployment Manager on DEV-IST and use the import organisation to reimport the organisation A and thus now have a organisation A now updated with my dev updates. The above process ensures that we deploy updates with very little downtime.

8. However, my issue is that after step 7 when I login to the organisation and go to Home -> Settings -> Customisations -> Customize the System... I cant see any of the custom entities!

Any ideas what might be causing this. Strangely I've noticed that I cant see custom entities in DEV-IST and PreProd but can see them in the DEV and UAT environments.

PS. I've already tried clicking the 'Publish all customizations' and it didnt have any effect.

Answer 1

Your deployment process is really complicated and I can't see any reason why are you doing customization transfer in so complex way. You should be simply transferring Solutions with your customizations from DEV environment to DEV-IST environment and then to UAT and PreProd.

Backing up your database on one environment and restoring it on another is for sure not faster way (because you stated that such process gives you short downtime of environment). Also if you insist of doing deployment this way, you should not only remove your organization from Deployment Manager, but also database from the server (and restore the backed up database).

If you are simply customizing CRM for your client/company, you should not use managed solutions. Managed solutions are used to share some reusable customizations that you want to share or sell to the others. Please read this great post by Shan McArthur, that will make you better understand the problem: https://community.adxstudio.com/blogs/shan/2014-01-17-converting-crm-solutions-from-managed-to-unmanaged/

And if you must use managed solutions - you should only do that on your final PROD environment, not on your staging environments (where you should have full control over customizations to provide hotfixes)

EDIT: I would add it as a comment, but I cannot comment yet, so I have to edit my response instead. I replicated your process and I can see all the entities on all environments, so there must be something specific that you are doing which is causing this behaviour. Have you checked that after you restored the database all the custom entities exist in your restored database? (every entity is a separate table which has the same name as the entity). Also I would compare all the solution-related tables in database where you can see the custom entities vs the database where you cannot see custom entities (so that would be tables SolutionBase, SolutionComponenBase, MetadataSchema.Entity and all other MetadataSchema.* tables). Last experiment you can do is to save somewhere the db where you cannot see the custom entities, remove the managed solution, import the managed solution (standard way) and check if the entities are there. I bet that they would be there, so the next step would be to again compare the databases (all the metadata/solution tables) with some red-gate comparison tool, maybe that would point you to the right direction.

Basically the metadata in CRM is built this way - take everything from the default solution, then apply all the managed solutions in order they were imported and build the resulting metadata. Your case looks like CRM somehow "forgot" to apply the managed solutions over the default solution ( I believe that this might be an unknown bug of deployment manager, that should set something during organization import). I hope that you will discover this when you compare your database data between environments.

I understand that this is not a valid response and normally I would not write it as an answer but as a comment, but I cannot comment yet, unfortunately :(

Answer 2

I finally got to the bottom of this issue and thought I'd update it here for anyone else who comes along with the same issue. 'Someone' put a registry edit on the CRM server to get CRM to return only the top 250 records on any query. As custom entities are above this number, they weren't being shown. I've since reverted this change and I'm able to see the custom entities now.