Category: Solutions

Fixing Solution Import Errors After Enabling “Create a New Activity” | Dynamics 365 / Dataverse

When you enable “Create a New Activity” for a custom Dataverse table, the platform automatically creates several activity-related relationships (Task, Email, ActivityPointer, etc.). This works fine in your current environment, but when you export the solution and import it into another environment, you may run into errors like:

“The entity relationship role of the referencing entity is required…”
“The referencing entity must have the CanBeRelatedEntityInRelationship property set to true.”

These errors appear because the solution is missing important metadata connected to the activity relationships that Dataverse generated automatically.

👉 Root Cause

Enabling “Create a New Activity” causes Dataverse to create new 1:N system relationships between your custom table and several Activity tables, such as:

  • ActivityPointer (Activity)
  • Task
  • Email
  • Phone Call
  • Appointment
  • Any other custom activity entity

When exporting your solution, the relationship metadata might be included, but the Activity tables themselves are not — causing the import to fail since the target environment cannot recreate these relationships without the updated metadata.

✅ Fix

To successfully import the solution into another environment, include all components involved in the new activity relationships.

Add these to your solution:

  1. Your custom table metadata (Mandatory)
    • Ensures the “Create a New Activity” setting is included.
  2. All activity tables are involved
    • Activity (ActivityPointer)
    • Task, Email, PhoneCall, Appointment (Optional)
    • Any other activity entity Dataverse linked automatically (Optional)
  3. Auto-generated 1:N activity relationships
    • Example:
      • yourTable_ActivityPointers
      • yourTable_Tasks
      • yourTable_Emails

Once all these pieces are included, the solution imports cleanly across environments.

💡Summary

If you enable “Create a New Activity” on a custom table, Dataverse creates several system-managed activity relationships. These relationships depend on the Activity and Task tables, so you must include:

✔ Your custom table metadata
✔ ActivityPointer + specific activity tables
✔ Auto-generated relationships

Adding these components ensures smooth solution imports and prevents frustrating metadata errors.