Solution Layering

I’ve recently noticed the Solution Layers button but knew next to nothing about its functionality.  It was added to my ever growing list of, “Ok, I need to check that out when I have some time!” 

While on a call this past week, the Solution Layers feature came up. After a brief overview on the call and some poking around afterwards, it looks to be a useful feature for developers, business analysts, and administrators.

What are Solution Layers?

Solution Layers is not some hidden, mystery feature.  Microsoft has done a great job recently with their online documentation and the article titled View solution layers includes a nice quick explanation of Solution layers:

• Let you see the order in which a solution changed a component.
• Let you view all properties of a component within a specific solution, including the changes to the component.
• Can be used to troubleshoot dependency or solution-layering issues by displaying change details for a component that was introduced by a solution change.

So the Solution Layers tool offers insight into system components and their relationships to Solution deployments. The significant bit here to me is that it shows changes to the component and when the installation or updates were introduced.

Where do I find Solution Layers?

When you select a Solution component, such as an Entity, Process, or Web Resource, or sub component such as an Entity Form or Attribute, you will now see a button labeled Solution Layers.

For example, I opened the Power Apps Checker solution in a recently provisioned demo environment.  Expanding the Entities, we can see the button on the Analysis Result Detail Entity. Drilling into the Forms list, we see the tool button available with the Information main Form.

If you open the Solution Layers dialog for the Analysis Result Detail Entity, we can see a one item list of Solutions.  This is a list of the Solutions to which this Entity is related.

Select the Solution listed and you can view the Analysis Result Detail Entity details that are related to the Solution.

This view provides the list of the changed properties for the Entity when the Solution was imported in the first Changed Properties ‘tab’, and the full list of Entity properties in the All Properties tab. If we open the Information Form for this Entity, we see very similar Information: a single Solution and the detailed changes of the selected Entity Form for that Solution import. 

We only see one item in both the Entity and Entity Form levels because this Entity and all of its components are unique to this Solution. We can also see the list of Changed Properties is the same as the list of All Properties. This tells us that the Analysis Result Detail Entity was installed with Power Apps Checker solution and has not been affected by any other Solution installs.

That is some nice information, but not especially useful. The Solution Layers component really shines when we look at Entities that can be impacted by other solution imports.  For example, a system Entity Contact can be impacted by many different Solutions on your system. Or you may have a custom Entity being deploying as part of a product or an ongoing project that will see regular changes, whether through major Solution releases or hotfix style solution deployments.

Contact is a popular Entity

If we open a different solution that contains the Contact Entity, we see the real power behind this tool. If we open the solution named Sales Navigator for Dynamics 365 Unified Interface that comes with my demo environment, and view the Contact Entity Solution Layers, we see some immediate differences.

The Contact Entity has been changed by 21 separate Solutions. The first at the bottom of the list is System, but at the top we see Active as the latest. This means that the Entity or one or more Entity sub components were updated with each of these 21 Solution imports. So, how do we see more detail on all of these Entity changes?

Deltas!

If we dig deeper into the Solution components, we can see more granular detail of the changes. We can drill into the Contact Forms list for this Solution and open the Contact Form Solution Layers dialog.

In this view, we can see that the Contact Form has been updated by 11 different Solution Imports. But what has been changed? Open up a solution from the list to find out:

In this view under Changed Properties, we can see detailed changes that were made with the Solution Import. In this example, we see the underlying Form JSON value was updated, and if you scroll a bit, you will also see that the Form XML. With other value types, such as numbers or boolean values, it’s easy to see the changed value.

For more complex types like Form JSON or XML, you can compare the differences to the previous Solution Layer value. Simply open the previous Solution Layer from the list and view the property value under the All Properties view using a standard text diff tool such as WinDiff or Visual Studio.

Why is this a big deal?

The Dynamics 365 CE and the Power Platform with CDS now has a built in method for change tracking of various layers of the solution components. I include the Power Platform here because when you view an Entity from a Model Driven Power Apps , you have the option of switching to Classic View. In Classic View, you can view the Solution Layers exactly as if you were working within a Dynamics 365 CE solution.

This can be incredibly useful when troubleshooting issues or just managing your own deployments. With solid DevOps practices in place, you should be able to view content like this using source code control tools. But if you are working on a project for which those practices were not well established, I can see this feature as a huge help for developers, business analysts, or system administrators.

I recommend reviewing the article listed above and playing around with the feature. For example, check out changes to solution components like Workflows where you can view the changes to the underlying XAML that contains the workflow logic.

I will be looking into it in more detail myself because I can see the possibility for some nice tools built around this capability!