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woodycwoodyc 

Force.com migration tool vs. Force.com IDE

We have been migrating code from sandbox to production using the Force.com IDE.  I am now learning how to use the ANT-based Force.com migration tool.  Does anyone have ideas about the benefits of using one tool over the other?  I cannot tell from my reading so far how to determine which tool is better and under what circumstances.

 

Additionally, does either tool work more easily with change control and versioning software for Salesforce.com?

 

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

 

-Woody

Best Answer chosen by Admin (Salesforce Developers) 
snugglessnuggles
Sure, we use voilaSVN, which we can access directly from Eclipse and the IDE using something called Subclipse.  we can then also access the svn via a browser or tortise, etc.  But subclipse is great because it is right there in your eclipse environment.  it takes a little bit of process training, but we've found this setup works best for version control, then we are careful actually committing changes.  Also, our projects aren't very large in scale, but we have a lot of them with many developers.  This approach also creates for you a little code library you can search and reference down the road.  there may be other ways out there.

All Answers

snugglessnuggles

hey woody,

 

the two tools rely on the same metadata api so there are a lot of fundamental similarities.  the IDE with eclipse is more of a visual interface while ant (migration tool) is command line driven.  if you like a friendly ui, i would use the ide, and if you like to manually manipulate xml i would try ant.  also, ant can provide more flexibility by allowing the user to set environment variables to control polling intervals, which is useful for very large orgs.  i think most people opt for the IDE but when i get stuck i revert to ant.

woodycwoodyc

Thanks for the feedback.  Have you used either method in conjunction with any versioning/change control software to manage multiple environments?  I am trying to map out a good methodology for our team to get migrations and sandbox refresh activities coordinated and with some decent controls on the code.

 

snugglessnuggles
Sure, we use voilaSVN, which we can access directly from Eclipse and the IDE using something called Subclipse.  we can then also access the svn via a browser or tortise, etc.  But subclipse is great because it is right there in your eclipse environment.  it takes a little bit of process training, but we've found this setup works best for version control, then we are careful actually committing changes.  Also, our projects aren't very large in scale, but we have a lot of them with many developers.  This approach also creates for you a little code library you can search and reference down the road.  there may be other ways out there.
This was selected as the best answer