Using ‘Clone a Patch’ & ‘Clone Solution’ in Dynamics 365 Solutions

Doing incremental deployments from Sandbox to Production is a part of every other D365 implementation.

And when do this, typically, you just create a new solution for every single time you move things over. This creates a lot of mess and leaves your Solutions in unorganized dump!

Let’s see how we can stay organized by using Clone a Patch and Clone Solution to keep things synced and clean

Clone a Patch

Clone a Patch should be used when you don’t want parent dependencies in the solution all over again unless you want to change them. So, always use this when you want to add newer things to a previously existing solution.

1. I have created MainSolution_1 as my main solution, the first time I started my customization. I added only 1 field, called Target Sale for demonstration purpose.
   
2. Now, let’s say I deployed it over, the next time I want to add some more functionality to the existing solution I deployed, I should not create another solution.
3. Rather, I’ll use Clone a Patch as shown below.
   
4. In Clone a Patch, I’ll keep the Display name same and the version number is configurable up to the last 2 sub-versions.
   
5. So this is how my Patched solution will look.
   
6. In this solution, I’ll add another field called as Min Target To Achieve and deploy it over to Production, maybe.
   

Clone Solution

Clone a Solution is used when you have a main solution and several patches. Clone a Solution will roll up everything into a new “parent” solution and remove every other solution of which you cloned including the source solution.

1. I’m select MainSolution_1, the first main solution I had created with the field Target Sale field. And then I chose to Clone Solution.
   
2. Similar to Clone a Patch, I have now the version control over the first 2 version numbers and since it is the first Clone, the final numbers are 0.0. I named it MainSolution_1_Cloned.
   
3. It takes a few moments to Clone everything.
   
4. Now, I have cloned the solution and the resultant solution has all the components from the Main Solution as well as from the Patch solution summed into 1 final solution.
   
5. Also, notice that all the other solutions including the MainSolution_1 from which I cloned this solution is deleted.
   

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Thereby, you have a clean Solutions area with all sorted work.

Hope this helps.