Solutions in Power Platform

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What are Solutions in Power Platform?

• Solutions used to transport apps and components from one environment to another, these components can be report, dashboard, entity, flows etc.

• Solutions used to apply customizations to existing apps.

• Solutions are the mechanism for Implementing ALM in Power Apps.

• The lifecycle of a solution (create, update, upgrade, and patch a solution)

• ALM is the lifecycle management of applications which easily helps to make project management, from requirements to deployment and it includes three areas.

• Governance includes requirements management, resource management, data security, user access, change tracking, review, audit, deployment control, and rollback,

• Development identifying current problems, and planning, design, building, and testing the application,

• Maintenance includes deployment of the app and maintenance of optional and dependent technologies.

• You must have environment with database to see the Solutions.

• You will find the solutions in the Power Apps make site

Power Platform Solution Types

There are two types of solutions:

1. Unmanaged Solutions “solutions with the open lock”.

2. Managed Solutions “Solutions with the closed lock”.

Unmanaged solutions

• Are used in development environments while you make changes to your application.

• You can export unmanaged solutions to either managed or unmanaged solutions.

• You can’t import a managed solution into the same environment that contains the unmanaged solution that you export from, so you will need another environment to import and test managed solution.

Managed solutions

• Are used to deploy to any environment that isn’t a development environment for that solution.

• You can’t export managed solutions.

As an ALM best practice you will generate the managed solutions from exporting the unmanaged solutions, and you must know that you can’t edit components in managed solution directly, you must add them first to an unmanaged solution, so you can be able to edit them.

Default Solutions in PowerApps

Within Power Apps, you can find a list of solutions that are the default unmanaged solutions that provided by PowerApps.

1. Common Data Service Default Solution, that makers can use them by default for their customizations in an environment and it is the default solution in Power Apps.

2. The Default Solution that contains all components in the system.

You must be aware that the default solution can’t be exported, therefore you can’t distribute the default solution to another environment.

By default, all enabled users can create apps and customize components in the Common Data Services Default Solution, and in this case, you will find difficulty to identify the customizations you’ve made in the environment, that’s why its recommended for the makers to use their own unmanaged solutions