Error when importing CRM solution 0x8004F658: The label {}, id: {} already exists. Supply unique labelid values.

I usually don’t post on CRM bugs but this one made me lose so much time that I figured I might share my experience.

We are in the middle of a CRM 2013 upgrade project and while transporting our main solution with all the entities we keep getting this error message: The label '{0}', id: '{1}' already exists. Supply unique labelid values while importing entity forms. I first thought that somehow we messed up the labels since we have a bilingual English and French system. However, after looking at the LocalizedLabel tables I could not find any duplicates of what the error message was talking about.

Then I decided to do a search in all the system forms in the target environment and check where the labelid occurred. I never really found a duplicate but I noiticed that in some cases the label already existed in the target environment in the formXML. This was as expected but to get over the problem I deleted the problematic forms in the target environment (since they will get overwritten by the new solution anyway). Some forms were the system forms so I could not really delete them, therefore I just stripped them down completely to remove all tabs, sections and fields as much as possible to make sure the custom labels would have been deleted.

Now I publish all the customizations and try importing again. Half of the failures are gone but I still get the same error message on some entity forms. I find it weird since the “duplicate” labels are nowhere to be found. I also validated that in my custoizations.xml the labelid was not duplicated, no, each GUID appeared only once.

With no time to call Microsoft support I had to find a work-around. So here’s what I do (not proud of the solution but it got me out of trouble). I open the customizations.xml file and locate the labelid which solution import is complaining about. And I simply generate a new GUID and replace it:

In some other cases there was not even a “labelid” attribute on the tab so I just added it with a new Guid. This happened in some tab, section and cell nodes, it was all over the place for some reason.

So after assigning a new Guid to all these sections I was able to import successfully. I never really had the time to go deeper into the root cause, but after talking to a colleague we suspect that the issue stems from the fact that we used the “Merge Forms” button that is available in CRM 2013 to help you upgrade your forms. The issue only occurred for the entities for which we used that feature so therefore our suspicion.

I will never be sure but I will try to avoid using that button until I have time to get back to the root cause analysis of this issue, lot of time wasted.

What’s up with CRM not working in latest version of Chrome?

You might have noticed that some features of CRM are no longer working after updating to Chrome 37. This posts provides some insight into work-arounds and possible solutions

All of the sudden seems like the CRM 2011 application is broken for Chrome for some features such as editing workflow send email steps. This is because CRM relies on a web API called showModalDialog() which Google Chrome is no longer supporting as of version 37, you can read more about it here. Note that it was deprecated since version 35 and Firefox has also deprecated that API.

So what can we do about it? Well, the easiest work around for now is to use Internet Explorer while you can find a more permanent solution. Microsoft has also published another temporary work-around so that you can continue to use Chrome: KB3000002. However, there are three bad news with that workaround. The first is that it requires each user to apply the work-around. The second is that users must have a highly privileged account on their work station in order to be able to apply the workaround, and we know that in the enterprise world, very few users will be given enough privileges or access to make the changes suggested by Microsoft. Finally the third bad news is that the work-around is only valid until May 2015!

Microsoft had quite a job to do in order to fix the entire CRM application to remove all the usage of showModalDialog(). This will probably take some time before we are able to apply a patch at the server level which will automatically fix the problem for all users. Perhaps before that happens there will be an easier work-around solution that Microsoft can come up with but don’t get your hopes up.

I guess this article is no good news for those who refuse to give IE a try, it’s one of the consequences of multi-browser support and Microsoft having little control on when other browsers drop support for API's that CRM relies on.