Dynamics 365 - Split Solutions

Question

We have a unmanaged CustomSolution in our DEV-Environment which contains all components for deployment. Usually we export and deploy this solution in a managed environment.

Our customer now wants to split this CustomSolution into 5 different smaller solutions. The process would be:

• Creating these 5 solutions in our dev environment as unmanaged
• delete the managed CustomSolution in the target environment
• export and import the 5 solutions into the target environment as managed

The question now is: Does anybody have experience with this? Or does one know how Dynamics will behave if we delete a managed solution in the target systen and then import the 5 splittet solutions?

Does this affect already existing components, etc?

Any hints, advices etc. are higly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you remove a managed solution, and it is the only one that references a specific entity or customization, then that entity or customization will be deleted.

You can take advantage of this rule.

1. Leave your managed solution deployed in the target.
2. Split up your solution into five managed solutions and import those into the target (nothing should change in the target as these managed solutions already contain all the same entities and customizations that are in the target).
3. Delete the original managed solution from the target. Since the other five managed solutions are installed and reference those customizations, no customizations will be deleted in the target.

Test this process of course! :)