While importing a solution to CRM 2011, CRM 2013, or CRM 2015 you receive an error
Fields that are not valid were specified for the entity
The Cause
The cause of this is likely that one of the attributes that you are importing (from a dev environment) already exists in the CRM instance, but with a different attribute.
For Example:
- In your Live Environment
- Within Accounts, you create a new attribute called “Friendly Cusomter” and mark it TEXT
- Publish and all is well and good.
- In you Dev Environment
- Within Accounts, you create a new attribute called “Friendly Customer” and make it a PICK LIST
in other words, the same name for the attribute, but a different kind of field.
Then try to export from DEV and import to LIVE. You get the error.
The solution
You have to remove the conflicting fields from the destination (live in the example above) CRM system.
Microsoft gives you some help here, in the form of an XML dump file. What you need to do is open that file in something like DreamWeaver that has the ability to apply “Source Formatting”. This makes the file pretty to read.
From
To
Then do a search for the text “errortext” and start clicking next / next till you get to some text with an attribute and an error message.
In our case:
<Cell ss:StyleID=”s137″ name=”ErrorText”>
<Data ss:Type=”String”>Attribute new_leasecustomer is a Picklist, but a Boolean type was specified.</Data>
</Cell>
This gives the name of the attribute at fault.
<Cell ss:StyleID=”s137″ name=”ErrorText”>
<Data ss:Type=”String”>Attribute new_leasecustomer is a Picklist, but a Boolean type was specified.</Data>
</Cell>
And the error on the import will tell you the Entity that it failed the import on. Again in this case it was the ACCOUNT entity.
So we just removed that attribute from any forms and views, then deleted the attribute (be sure that your live data is not relying on data entered here by users as you will loose it). Publish the entity. Then test the import again.