Deployment

In the new world of second generation packaging (2GP) capabilities such as Unlocked Packages mean the technical aspects of packaging are no longer a concern only for ISV developers but are now equally applicable to enterprise development. The Salesforce Developer Experience (SFDX) developer guide documentation provides a great reference for those getting started with packaging […]

This post provides a high-level overview of the Winter ’16 enhancements to the Custom Metadata Types platform capability. Custom Metadata Types – The App Configuration Engine for Force.com There are in my view two distinct ways to consider Custom Metadata Types (CMT); firstly as analogous to Custom Settings and secondly as an architecturally significant paradigm […]

This first video post provides a brief introduction to scripted Salesforce deployment with the Force.com Migration Tool and Ant.

This post presents a basic model for the control of change within a Salesforce development process. Best practice suggests that all non-trivial projects should implement some degree of governance around environment change, i.e. Change Control. This is perhaps obvious, what isn’t necessarily obvious is how to achieve effective change control without introducing friction to the […]

A very common challenge addressed by architects working with Salesforce is the definition of an appropriate release methodology. By this I mean the identification of the Salesforce orgs required to support the project delivery whether serial or concurrent in nature, the role and purpose of each org and critically, the means by which change is […]

This post outlines my preferred approach to managing parallel developments on the Salesforce platform in what I refer to as the Converged Programme Model. I readily acknowledge that there’s a multitude of ways to accomplish this each with it’s own subjective merits. Before adopting a parallel work-stream model take the time to understand the technical […]

Quick post highlighting some Summer ’13 goodness for metadata deployment. 1. Abort a running deployment – This is a massive improvement enabling failed or inadvertent deployments to be cancelled whilst in progress. Anyone working on large deployments will bear witness how frustrating it can be to watch a 30 minute deployment run to completion with […]

On occasion when deploying components between orgs you may encounter a database-level category of deployment error, bubbling up from the underlying Oracle RDBMS with limited information to support any diagnostic process. The example below is one such case I’ve seen in practice recently. Most concerning about this type of error is that the deployment appears […]

The Salesforce metadata API is an extremely powerful tool, when combined with Ant, Jenkins etc. for build automation. There is however a number of configuration items that simply can’t be retrieved and deployed using this API (Account Teams, Support Settings, Lead Settings, Case Assignment and Escalation Rules etc.). The unsupported list can be found here, […]

If your deployment process involves manual modification of the metadata files between retrieve and deploy steps, it’s time to consider extending your knowledge of Ant. This is critical for Continuous Integration where manual processes are an anathema. With a small amount of Ant knowledge you can delete metadata files, edit and replace/remove content via regex, […]