Thursday 15 November 2018

Error importing solutions - "The 'options' attribute is invalid"

I hope that this post will be short-lived, and few people need it, but I had an issue today in Dynamics 365 v9.1 (version 1710 (9.1.0.638) for completeness), where a solution file failed to import. The error occurred on initial parsing on the solution file. The error was 'This solution package cannot be imported because it contains invalid XML' , and the technical details were:

Schema Validation Failed

Schema validation of the customizations.xml file within the compressed solution package file failed. To manually validate and edit the file, you can download the schema file here and use an XML editor that supports schema validation to get more details.

The 'options' attribute is invalid - The value '' is invalid according to its datatype 'String' - The Pattern constraint failed

This was followed by a snippet of a view XML definition, which gave a hint to the problem. It looks like Dynamics 365 has new attribute 'options' within the fetchXml schema. This is currently set to an empty string, but the solution importer fails to recognise it, hence the error. The affected part of the xml is:

            <fetch version="1.0" output-format="xml-platform" mapping="logical" distinct="true" options="" >

Fortunately, there's a relatively simple workaround to remove this attribute from a solutions file.
  1. Extract the solution xml
  2. Open customizations.xml
  3. Do a Find & Replace to remove all the following text: options=""
  4. Then recreate the .zip and it should import
This affects any solution that contains a view (I haven't tested to see if it also applies to charts or reports), and isn't due to a version mismatch between organisations, as I could replicate it by exporting and importing into the same organisation