A table, Extended Data Type, Base Enum, or class called already exists. Import of Table aborted.

Microsoft Dynamics (Axapta) 2012 R1.

So, on Monday I was trying to import a project into my Live environment and I get this error.  After some research, I believe I know what caused the error, and how to fix it, so I’m going to share those with you.

First off, the object that was causing the error was a new table that I’d created called Tem_SlitOrderSizes.  I tried importing just that table, didn’t work.  I tried exporting it again in case the file was corrupted – no dice.

I’m 90% certain I know what caused this.  You see, at my company I have three environments:  Dev, Test, and Live.  Usually I make our development in Dev and then import the changes into Live.  Ideally we would use Test to… test them.  But we don’t have a testing team as I am the sole developer here.  So Test is generally unused.  However, for this particular project I elected to develop it in Test, as there was a lot of stuff I was doing in Dev at the time and I wanted a degree of separation between my Dev projects and my current project.  But because Test was old, it’s table identifiers are out of date.  Basically, the new table I created had an identifier that was already in use for another table in Live, because I’d made some other table in Dev and imported it into Live at some point.

Thankfully, the solution was simple – reset the cache!  In your live development workspace, go to Tools -> Caches and refresh all three of the options there.  Then you can import the class.  Although in the future, proper environment usage would be the way to go.