Converting a Managed Solution to Unmanaged in Power Platform

A colleague reached out regarding this. He had exported a solution as managed, then deleted the existing one and imported it after some changes… only to realize that he was now stuck with a managed solution. :) He wanted to know if I could restore the previous solution from a backup.

In the portal I can recover an environment, but that restores everything in it… obviously not what we want to do here! So I did the one thing everyone does in such a situation… Google! Found a forum post that had an unofficial solution that worked. That worked for my colleague too so this blog post is for me to note it coz I am sure one day I am going to be in the same boat.

To quote from that post:

1. Extract the solution.xml file from managed zip file.

2. Edit the value from 1 to 0 for <Managed> tag.

3.Load and overwrite with the new edited solution.xml file into the zip file (please note if you just extract all the file and zip them all back, it will fail when you will try to import the solution)

4. Import the new zip file into solution.

I added some emphasis on step 3 because that’s exactly what I had done one time and the imported solution didn’t work – now I know why. Unzipping and rezipping doesn’t do the trick!