Not all Business Process Flow entities are created equal

As you probably know by now, when you create Business Process Flows in 8.2+ you'll get a new custom entity that is used to store running instances (if not then read my post on the new Business Process Flow entities).

When your orgs are upgraded to 8.2 from a previous version then the business process flow entities will be created automatically for you during the upgrade. They are named according to the format:

new_BPF_<ProcessId>

Notice that the prefix is new_. This bothered me when I first saw it because if you create a Business Process Flow as part of a solution then the format will be:

<SolutionPrefix>_BPF_<ProcessId>

Here lies the problem. If you import a pre-8.2 solution into an 8.2 org, then the Business Process Flows will be prefixed with the solution prefix – but if the solution is in-place upgraded then they will be prefixed with new.

Why is this a problem?

Once you've upgraded the pre-8.2 org to 8.2 then the Business Process Flows will stay named as new_ and included in the solution. When you then import an update to the target org – the names will conflict with each other and you'll get the error:

"This process cannot be imported because it cannot be updated or does not have a unique name."

Source 8.1 Org
Solution with myprefix_

Empty 8.2 Org

Export

Import

 

BPF entity created - myprefix_BPF_xxx

Upgraded to 8.2

BPF entity created - new_BPF_xxx

 

Export

Import

 

"This process cannot be imported because it cannot be updated or does not have a unique name."

new_BPF_xxx conflicts with myprefix_BPF_xxx

 

How to solve

Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way out of this situation. There are two choices:

  1. If you have data in the target org that you want to keep – you'll need to recreate the BPFs in the source org so that they have the myprefix_ - you can do this by following the steps here - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4020021/after-updating-to-dynamics-365-mismatched-business-process-flow-entity
  2. If you are not worried about data in the target org you can delete those BPFs and re-import the solution exported from the upgraded 8.2 source org.

The good news is that this will only happen to those of you who have source and target orgs upgraded at different times – if you upgrade your DEV/UAT/PROD at the same time you'll get BPFs entities all prefixed with new_

@ScottDurow

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