dependency in wrong direction

[JenniferK]

Hi All,

I've got 2 solutions:

• Common Tables
• My App

My App depends on Common Tables.  Common Tables does not depend on My App. In my dev environment, they are working fine.

I exported them and tried to install them in my test environment. I attempted to install Common Tables first but I received a missing dependency error. Here are the details:

What bothers me about the above is that all the items it says that it requires are part of My App and each of them is not required by the item in the "Required by" column, but instead requires the item in that column.

i.e. Facility (My App) requires Organization Structure (Common Tables) not the other way around.

When I look directly at the dependencies for the Organization Structure table, this is what I see:

So why does my test environment think Common Tables is dependent on My App?

[Prakash4691]

Hi @JenniferK ,

It looks like there is a relationship exist between facility and organizational structure entity.

Check whether facility entity has been included in your common table solution.

If it is first time you are deploying in test environment make sure to add all the components of custom entity.

Regards,

Prakash

[dpoggemann · Accepted solution]

Hi @JenniferK ,

It looks like you have added lookups to a number of your entities in your Common Tables solution that are in your My App solution.  Now, since you have never deployed the Common Tables solution to the test environment without these columns existing in the Dataverse on those tables, when you export the solution and bring to the test environment, the columns already exist (therefore creating the dependency).  

You would actually need to have two different development environments with the Common Tables (without the fields from the Facility, etc.) existing at all in that environment and then promote this to your test environment as a managed solution.  You will not have this problem with the dependency in this case because there would be no columns for the Facility on the common tables...

The 2nd development environment would import the Common Tables solution as a managed solution and develop your app in that environment and add the additional tables and lookups to the common tables etc.  

Finally you would export the solutions from both these separate environments and import them as managed solutions to your test environment.

[JenniferK]

I never included any components from My App in Common Tables. But I was developing both of them in the same dev environment. And My App does have lookups to Common Tables. 

I did a whole lot of "unbuilding" to get rid of all the dependencies. Then I moved Common Tables to another dev environment. Then I reset my original dev env and installed Common Tables as a managed solution. After that, I rebuilt My App with the necessary lookups. Everything behaves properly now and I can install managed versions of Common Tables and My App into my test env without problems.

The entire situation was surprising to me since it's not something that we're warned against doing-- or at least not in a way that was obvious to me. I hope that my experience saves others from frustration and wasted time. I also hope that MS updates their docs to help users avoid this situation.