Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

This post is regarding the usage of the Azure DevOps Power Platform Tools. I am not sure how to actually perform an operation regarding solution imports that I am able to perform manually in the Power Apps import solution UI.

Let's say I have a exported a managed solution from my development environment, and I want to import that solution to a TEST and PROD environment. If I am performing the import manually, I get three options to choose from (copied from Update a solution - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs)

Upgrade This is the default option and upgrades your solution to the latest version and rolls up all previous patches in one step. Any components associated to the previous solution version that are not in the newer solution version will be deleted. This is the recommended option as it will ensure that your resulting configuration state is consistent with the importing solution including removal of components that are no longer part of the solution.
Stage for Upgrade This option upgrades your solution to the higher version, but defers the deletion of the previous version and any related patches until you apply a solution upgrade later. This option should only be selected if you want to have both the old and new solutions installed in the system concurrently so that you can do some data migration before you complete the solution upgrade. Applying the upgrade will delete the old solution and any components that are not included in the new solution.
Update This option replaces your solution with this version. Components that are not in the newer solution won't be deleted and will remain in the system. This option is not recommended as your destination environment will differ in configuration from your source environment and could cause issues that are difficult to reproduce and diagnose.

When we are using Azure DevOps pipelines with Power Platform Tools to handle the managed solution imports, we don't seem to have all 3 of the options.

We can use the Power Platform Import Solution task. This will import the managed solution, but it seems to perform the Update (not recommended) process outlined in the Microsoft documentation. In order words, it doesn't delete components that were removed from the solution.

This is not ideal for us, so we currently are setting the Power Platform Import Solution task option to Import as a holding solution so that it is turned on in our release pipeline and then adding the Power Platform Apply Solution Upgrade task to run afterwards. Something like this:

However, I am wondering if there is a way to do the Upgrade process without having to do the Import Holding Solution and Apply Solution Upgrade process? In other words, how do I mimic what I can do manually in the import solution UI when I select the Upgrade option?

Categories:

Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

Behind the scenes, when you're manually importing a solution, the Upgrade step is doing the same as the Stage for Upgrade, so the only difference is that it is automatically rolling up any patches and deleting any unused components in your new version of the managed solution, rather than you having to manually go into the solution explorer and upgrade the solution.

Via the release pipeline I prefer that I have full control over the upgrade process, e.g. you can choose to not do the stage for upgrade which then falls back to doing a normal update which doesn't delete any components (perhaps a nice to have if for some reason you actually didn't want to delete a component and you didn't have it backed up in source control, or you realised that some component was still serving a purpose in your target deployment environment).

Additionally If you needed to run some additional actions in your target environment as part of your release pipeline before you want to actually upgrade the solution, then this also gives you that flexibility.

If you really wanted a single task that mimics the manual "Upgrade" option, then you can create a task group that calls the task to do the import as as a holding solution, followed by the task that applies the solution upgrade