Set the solution context for customizations

Enabled for	Public preview	Early access	General availability
Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically	Oct 2, 2023	-	-

Business value

Today, updates made to objects, including apps and tables, automatically add those customizations to the default solution in Microsoft Dataverse. This is named Common Data Services default solution. Moreover, Dataverse uses the default publisher with solutions, which is named CDS Default Publisher.

For those makers who want to change where make.powerapps.com automatically stores their customizations, they'll be able to select any other unmanaged solution as the active solution context. This will also mean customizations leverage the solutions' publisher prefix when creating schema and unique names for the solution object. Makers can take advantage of the whole make.powerapps.com experience and have customizations land in the appropriate solution ready for successful application lifecycle management (ALM).

Feature details

Healthy ALM relies on publishers and solutions. Customizations are added to solutions so they can be shipped from development to testing to production. Each customization has a unique name so that it can be created, distributed, and updated over time. Unique names for objects and customizations start with a publisher prefix to define which organization created these customizations and reduce the chance of conflicting changes when importing. Today, there is a way to configure solutions and which publishers' prefix will be used in customizations, however this is an advanced maker scenario as the maker must use the legacy solution explorer to craft their solutions. For makers that haven't yet gone down the path of understanding and building out custom solutions, any updates they make are put into the Common Data Services Default Solution that comes out of the box in all new Dataverse databases. The publisher for this default solution is random and might not reflect the need of the maker once they get to the point of shipping their customizations in a solution.

With the introduction of this active solution context feature, makers can specify the default solution used in the environment, and this solution will be used when building or customizing solutions components. Upon release, the default solution used by make.powerapps.com will remain the same but makers can change this as desired using the settings panel or the solution list page. Soon, future admins will be able to define rules on what solution names to use and what tenant wide publisher to apply when new databases are created.

See also

Set the preferred solution (docs)