New XrmToolBox tool : Components Comparer
Tanguy TOUZARD
Chef de projet / Lead technique PowerPlatform / Dynamics 365 chez Talent Business Solutions
I'm on the managed solutions team
I don't know if you are like me but I'm in the managed solutions team. Yes, I do like them and use them in all my projects. But there are some difficulties anyway... One of them is the problem of people modifying manually components over a managed environment like production or UAT. This applies an unmanaged layer that can prevent futur release to be applied (as the unmanaged layer takes precedence over any managed layer).
Fortunately, there are some tools to identify these unmanaged layers. One of them is Solution Layer removal tool in XrmToolBox. I really like this tool that shows you quickly the components manually changed in a specific environment.
Identifying manual changes
Now, another problem is to identify what is the change that has been applied. What I want is to replicate this change in my development environnement so that after next release, I can safely remove the unmanaged layer without disturbing users because what would have been released is the same as what has been manually customized.
This is where my new tool comes to the rescue! Components Comparer allows you to select a table, a column and a specific row and compare the content between two environments. As there is some specific tables, the tool also provides specific components selection like Security roles (to compare their privileges) and Webresources (to compare their content). Of course, except for roles and webresources (they can be retrieved by their name too), it requires to maintain the same unique Id for records across environments but this is a best practice, isn't i
What does it look like?
With this tool, you just have to select a table, a column to compare and select a row. Then click on Compare button. You will be presented with the differences between records of both environments.
Credits
In this tool, I used two open source projects:
Constant learner.
1 年This is absolutely great post, love it. Thanks Tanguy TOUZARD for that
Consultant Dynamics 365 Senior - Chef de projets Freelance / Président d'Inforia / Auteur du jeu de société "Les Héros du sang"
3 年Of course you're in the managed solutions team ?? Even if managed solutions are now much more robust than they were in the past, manual slight unmanaged changes can still happen from time to time, so thanks for this tool !
Solution Architect at ANS Group, School Governor at Tonacliffe Primary
3 年Anthony Rutter Bill Egan Girish Nandwani Lloyd Broley Michael Violette Matt Eden Gina Latocha
practice lead CE managed Services | Customer team Management - HSO
3 年Robin Blaauw Lieven Ockers Claire van der Pol
Microsoft Certified Techno-Functional D365 CE/CRM Architect, Developer, Configurer and Consultant
3 年This is awesome tool for many uses! We run a fairly complex ALM through DevOps consisting of 28 environments at current time. Keep in mind you can always remove the active layer, and as long as the customizations remain in the managed solution below it (since we ALWAYS re-do the live changes in dev... RIGHT?!? :) ), the customizations should remain on your form after removing unmanaged layer. To be sure, remove unmanaged layer before laying your managed upgrade down - you should be in the clear. I will be downloading this tomorrow! Great work.