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andrew_mowatandrew_mowat 

Genral Code/Config Deployment

Hi All,

I am fairly new to Salesforce and I am investigating the tools available for code promotion between environments.  I  have the Eclipse IDE and the new Migration Toolkit installed.

What I would like to be able to do is make changes to our sandbox environment through the website (standard object changes, page layouts, users etc etc).  Then I would like to be able to promote these changes to our live environment somehow without having to re-key everything! In time I would also like to promote s-controls, apex and visualforce code, however I don't require this just now.

Can anyone advise if this is available with the current tools?

Many thanks,
Andrew
learnSFlearnSF
You can deploy to live through Force.com IDE tool.
andrew_mowatandrew_mowat
From what I have read, it seems that you can only deploy custom objects, s-controls etc through the IDE.

Is it possible to deploy standard Salesforce objects as well.  Do these have to be packaged in some way?

As an example, would it be possible to have a sandbox and live environment in sync.  Then make some minor changes to the sandbox (updating a page layout, adding to a drop down list etc), and have these changes promoted to the live env?
JonPJonP
Andrew,

See the Force.com Migration Guide at http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/daas/salesforce_migration_guide.pdf  (link) for detailed instructions.

Jon
andrew_mowatandrew_mowat
Hi Jon,

I am trying to use the retrieveUnpackaged call and getting some strange behaviour.

I am expecting to retrieve all the workflow metadata.  However, each time I execute the retrieve, I get the classes and triggers instead.  Also, each time I execute, my current Package.xml is overwritten with a totally different version, which details the members to download as ApexClasses and ApexTriggers.

Any help you can give would be appreciated as I can't see what else to change!

My Build.xml only contains (along with proxy information):

<target name="retrieveUnpackaged" depends="proxy">
        <mkdir dir="retrieveUnpackaged"/>
        <!-- Retrieve the contents into another directory -->
        <sf:retrieve username="${sf.username}" password="${sf.password}" serverurl="${sf.serverurl}" retrieveTarget="retrieveUnpackaged" unpackaged="unpackaged/package.xml"/>
    </target>

And in my Package.xml:

<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <types>
        <members>*</members>
        <name>WorkFlow</name>
    </types>
    <version>13.0</version>
</Package>

Which is overwritten with this after executing the retrieve:

<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <types>
        <members>*</members>
        <name>ApexClass</name>
    </types>
    <types>
        <members>*</members>
        <name>ApexTrigger</name>
    </types>
    <version>13.0</version>
</Package>

Thanks,
Andrew





akhilesh_sfdcakhilesh_sfdc
Hi Andrew,

I have ran through this scenario multiple times and have never faced any issue. You need to modify the unpackaged/package.xml to retrieve Workflows. The retrieved output should be inside the retrieveUnpackaged folder.

If it still doesn't work, please email me the ant-salesforce.jar along with the build.xml, that you are using and I will try to have a look.

Thanks,
Akhilesh
andrew_mowatandrew_mowat
I am still having the same issues with the Migration tool, however I have reverted to using the Force Eclipse IDE and that seems to work.

I was hoping someone could give me a bit of information as to what can/can't be published using metadata.  Ideally I want to publish everything from my sandbox to my lilve environment (essentially doing a diff between them and selecting what I want to publish).  I see when creating a package within Salesforce front end, you can include Reports, Dashboards, Custom Buttons etc.
Are Reports and Dashboards something that is represented using metadata? If not, how are these moved from one env to another?

Many thanks,
Andrew
JonPJonP
Both the Force.com Migration Tool Guide (linked above) and the Metadata API Developer's Guide offer a complete list of all Force.com components exposed as metadata files as of Summer '08.  This list will continue to expand with each new release.

Dashboards and reports currently are not accessible as metadata files.