Is it possible to export selective customizations in a Dynamics CRM 2011 default solution

Question

I am trying to see if this is possible, Basically I have customized several entities and among them I have modified the 'contacts' entity and created a new public view for it in the default solution in CRM 2011 online. Now I want to export (just the 2 changes to the 'contacts' entity) to a new CRM 2011 instance.

Is there a way to export just these two changes or selectively decide which customizations you want to export to the new CRM instance?

I am trying to understand this for a typical "push QAed changes from staging to production" kind of scenario, are there any best practices for managing your changes in CRM 2011?

Thanks,

Deepak.

Answer 1

You can choose a particular entity to export, however, you can't choose to export/import just part of the entity. The forms, views, ribbon changes, and custom attributes will always come along for the ride.

Answer 2

By default you must export the component as a whole by creating a solution (managed or unmanaged) and then selecting "add existing component".

You can export portions of a component but to do that you must delve in to the XML of the exported solution. For example you can export just the ribbon for an entity, or just the form of an entity. The method is to just edit the customizations file and remove the portions you don't want to export/update. Your initial logic might be that if it is removed from the customizations file then won't it mean that it will be removed from the destination organization on import? No, that's not how it works. Read on for more info.

If you want to delete a field from an entity for example within a managed solution, how would you do that? You can't delete it from an org, export the updated version of the solution and import it in to the destination org as CRM will just keep the field. You must create a temporary solution with the entity with the attribute removed. Import the temporary solution to the destination org so that you can remove the actual solution you want to update. After you remove the actual solution you want to update, you update it to not have the field then re import. Once reimported you can remove the temporary solution. Messy.

Hope that helps.