Recently I started working on a project that was implementing Advanced Warehouse in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. The previous consultants had started to setup the advanced warehouse module. They had started to setup some location directives, work templates, wave templates, as well as other basic setups for the advanced warehouse module.

Unfortunately some of these settings were already going into a configuration (Gold) environment. When I started working with the client I had a development environment that I was setting up Advanced Warehouse in for the client. The question became how would I move these configurations from the development environment to the user acceptance testing environment and then on to Gold without having to remember every change I made in my development environment?

Luckily the data management workspace has us covered. When a file is uploaded via the data management workspace the data is only updated by default. However, there is a Yes/No slider that can change this behavior. The slider name is Truncate entity data.

When this is set to yes, prior to the data being uploaded, the data entity is truncated or in other words the data is removed from the entity.

In order to move my configuration data from my development instance over to the Gold instance I simply exported my data, using the 400 – Advanced Warehouse template, and imported the data ensuring that the Truncate entity data flag was set.

There is on caution I’ll warn you about when using this. If for whatever reason one of your entities fails to upload, you’ll want to make sure and correct that entity and re-upload. This is because the data is truncated prior to the upload. Let’s take wave templates for example. What happens is that prior to upload the wave template entity is cleared. Then the data load fails to happen. There will be no wave templates in the system at that point. Just be sure to take care of any errors you receive when uploading the files.