Explanation: What are layers

Objective

In the context of the Power Platform, managed and unmanaged solutions are packaging and deployment concepts that relate to the layers within Power Platform applications. These concepts are essential for organizing, customizing, and distributing your apps and components. Let's explore how managed and unmanaged solutions fit into the layers:

Managed vs. Unmanaged solutions

Details Managed solution Unmanaged solution
Definition Managed solutions are packaged collections of app components, including canvas apps, flows, tables, entities, connectors, and more, that are designed for distribution, deployment, and version control. Unmanaged solutions are collections of app components that are designed for development and customization within a specific environment. They are not locked and can be freely modified.
Key Characteristics
  • They are intended for distribution to other environments or tenants, such as moving from a development environment to a production environment.
  • Managed solutions are typically locked to prevent direct customization or editing of the included components by recipients.
  • They can be versioned, imported, and exported to maintain a controlled development lifecycle.
  • Unmanaged solutions allow you to modify, extend, and customize the components they contain directly in the environment where they are created.
  • Components within unmanaged solutions can be freely edited, deleted, and added to meet development and testing needs.
  • They are typically used during the app's development and testing phase.
Use cases
  • Managed solutions are suitable for deploying finalized applications to production environments.
  • They ensure that app components remain consistent and unchanged when moved to different environments.
  • Managed solutions are the preferred choice for app distribution and sharing with other organizations.
  • Unmanaged solutions are ideal for customizing and extending app components during the development process.
  • They provide flexibility for developers to make changes and updates without restrictions.
  • Unmanaged solutions are not intended for distribution to other environments as they allow unrestricted customization.

Layers

HR for Dynamics always comes as Managed Solution. If you make changes to components from the HR for Dynamcis solution, an unmanaged layer will be created. Be aware: When we ship our newest Rollup Updates within the Package Deployer, we always update the Managed Solution. That means we do not overwrite your Unmanaged Layers (your Customizations). That means you need to keep in mind, whenever Hubdrive does a Rollup Update, it can happen that you will not get all changes, if you have your own customizations.
Therefore, we recommend you remove unmanaged layers before updating your HR solution if you are not 100% sure you have customizations you want to keep. You can find more information on this in the Update Guide.

For more information on solution layers see the respective Microsoft tutorial.

This picture shows a general overview about what layers are: Screenshot