CRM2011 Export issue - how to not export an entity(account,product) to which I have created a relationship

Question

I have following scenario

1) my customer has multiple vendors A and B

2) Vendor A has modified lots of basic entities (account, product etc)  SOLUTION-A

3) Vendor B be has created new entities and only linked those with account and product (n-1, 1-n) SOLUTION-B. No modifications for account and or product.

QUESTION: How can vendor be export their solution so that it does not include account and product entities ? As they will be merged with SOLUTION-A and this is not what should happen ? Or how should we hande this kind of scenario ?
(we tried to remove account/product from unmanaged SOLUTION-B, but as we exported it as managed and imported it .. it did not work (import ok, but creating new entity fails).

Cheers,

PEKKA

---

Pekka

Answer 1

How best to use Solutions did really throw me for a loop when I first started getting familiar with 2011.

Couple quick questions:

1. Are they developing/configuring in seperate environments or the same one?

2. If the same, is there a reason why they're using separate solutions, is it just for isolating "their" portions and exporting/importing their changes at different intervals?

But yes, you're right. You dont want Vendor B importing a solution with account/product entities and potentially overwriting views/forms or whatever that Vendor A has configured. CRM should probably warn you when you're exporting Vendor B solution because it doesn't contain those two entities its dependment upon, and when its generating the xml/zip file for you, it will probably drop those relationships.

If Vendor A and B are working on functionality that interdependment, and works with one another, I'd strongly suggest they share the same (unmanaged?) solution.

If this isn't possible, and they prefer to deploy their changes at different times, there's a couple things you could do:

1. Just once, have Vendor B export/import their solution with account/product entities. (this could overwrite form and view changes like i said above) Have Vendor A follup up by exporting/importing their solution, and this will fix the issue. Then have Vendor B remove account/product from their solution in the future. This will create the relationships amongest the entities in the target system, and going forward, because imports are only addative (they dont remove anything), you should be good to go.

2. You could try to manually re-create the relationships in the target system with the exact schema names thats in your source implementation, however, this could be risky, and sometimes you can get some unexpected issues with doing this. I would probably shy away from this approach.

Good luck!