How to delete a Solution from Production Environment

[Daved5]

Hello - I am trying to delete a SOlution from the Production environment, but I keep getting dependency warnings.

THe reason i want to delete the production SOlution is I cannot upgrade it.  Again, the Import of the new SOlution fails in Production because the old version in production cannot be deleted.

I saw others having this issue, and the work around is to delete the Solution in Production.

Solution failed to import: Solution Upgrade action... - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

However, I cannot delete the solution in Production because of dependencies.  ANy ideas on how i can proceed to delete the old version of a Solution in production so that i can import the new version ?

[rampprakash]

Hi @Daved5 

Do you have managed or unmanaged solution in your environment?

[gowrihalan04]

@Daved5 Did you check below link ? Maybe component in the solution is dependent on other solution.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/troubleshoot/dynamics/crm/error-when-uninstallin... 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/dynamics-365/sales/cannot-uninstall-solution-error-wh... 

[joaodsantos]

Hey,

Others have already suggested a few approaches, and even though it's not specified if it's managed or unmanaged (guessing managed otherwise you wouldn't get dependency errors while deleting the solution) but there's a plugin on XrmToolbox that handles this sort of situation:

https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/ManagedSolutionBulkRemover/

The author went on the XrmToolcast podcast some time ago and explained how it works and that it's mainly used to delete Microsoft default solutions (Marketing or Sales for example). You basically select a managed solution and the tool searches all dependencies and deletes them, if those dependencies have dependencies it recursively figures out what to delete.

Make sure you test it on a copy of the environment just to make sure it works as expected and doesn't delete something you need but if all other options fail this might help you.

[Fubar · Accepted solution]

Please remember that deleting a Managed Solution can also delete Data.

"When you delete a managed solution, the following data is lost: data stored in custom entities that are part of the managed solution and data stored in custom attributes that are part of the managed solution on other entities that are not part of the managed solution." - to keep data you may need to first 'layer' another solution with all the custom entities and attributes over the top of the one that you want to delete.

If you are looking for more info on the failure, you could try 

• check the Solution History as sometimes it gives you a little bit more info, Advanced Settings->Solution History, change the view to All Operations and find the failure open it to see if any additional info.
• Can also try looking using Advanced Find on "Import Job" and looking at the Data column 

[Daved5]

Thanks all for your suggestions.  Yes Managed Solution,.  I looked at the Solution History and it told me where the dependency was that was creating the problem.  I created a new solution called "Fix" that only had the table with the dependency issues, and i deleted the column in that table (because I was trying to delete it in the other solution, and imported that one into production.  Then after a few more "Fix" imports for other dependency issues, the original import finally worked.  Thanks...