Deploying a solution more than once behavior?

[Joshua-Young]

We are on ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5. I am noticing that when I try to deploy a solution a second time instead of creating a new folder with all new items what happens instead is a new folder is created with a new solution item but the only other items in the new folder are apps, maps, or services that were not in the original solution or I deleted from the original solution. Is that the expected behavior?

For example, two years ago I deployed version 1.0 of the GIS Request Management solution to test but my boss cancelled the deployment for something else. I never deleted that deployed solution. Now I have an opportunity to deploy it again. We are now on 11.5 and have access to version 1.1 of the GIS Request Management solution. I deployed version 1.1 and all that was added to a new folder was a solution item, the site item, the site page item, and the GIS_Activities_surveys view (I don't remember why but I had to delete and recreate that view in version 1.0).

I was hoping that it would create a whole new copy of the solution and not link to the old deployment in any way.

[ChrisFox]

Unfortunately the ability to target a specific layer to deploy on top of is not yet available. It is a new capability we are exploring for a future release. In addition, picking specific parts to deploy is also another enhancement we are exploring.

The quickest way to get a fresh new deployment of the solution is to deploy another version of Parks and Grounds Management. This is all assuming you haven't deleted the 'Solution' item with your other Parks and Grounds Management solutions. When you deploy a second copy of the same solution version, i.e 1.1 it will create a new folder with all new items for the the solution. You can then make your desired schema changes to those layers and load your data into the new layers.

I also want to note, the location of the items in the folder has no effect on whether items will be deleted or not when you delete a solution. We don't use the folder to determine which items are associated with a given solution. Each solution stores a relationship to the items that were created with its deployment and it uses that during a delete.