I recently encountered a post in the CRM Dynamics Forum. The post referenced a fairly odd error message, “Failure: contact_activity_parties: Cascade link type ‘NoCascade’ is invalid for Delete.” that resulted when a user was trying to import Customizations from one environment to another.
Since this is an error message that I hadn’t previously encountered, my first thought after reading the post was that the issue might be related to not importing the related entities. Attempting to import an entity that has a dependency on another entity and not including the related entity in the import file is a common issue that occurs. Changes to related entities like the Account or some other related entity might have been made that create a new dependency between the two entities and the system now needs to have both entities imported. I provided that as my first suggestion, but still no joy.
Shortly after providing the advice, I came across another post where an individual was experiencing the exact same issue. The good news is that the user offered a fix for the issue. The issue is related to a fairly well-known requirement. The requirement for importing customization files is that both environments must be on the same Update Rollup. In this scenario, the user was trying to import a customization file from a environment with Update Rollup 10 into an environment that had Update Rollup 11.
Fortunately the fix for this issue was easy. Simply apply Update Rollup 11 to the environment that lacked the update and the import worked as expected.
I hope this helps anyone experiencing this issue.
Cheers
Donna Edwards 