Showing posts with label Ant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ant. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Why yank the Component Types table from SFMT Guide?

It seems that in the new Force.com Migration Tool Guide for Winter '14, the big table of component types - what are allowed in the element - has been removed.  In its place now is a link to the Metadata Types in the Metadata API Guide.  That's a major rollback of usability without any apparent gain for a number of reasons.

  • While the FMT tool is based on the Metadata API, its element usage doesn't necessarily translate nicely from what in the API.  The Tool Guide users are definitely looking for ready-to-use information for the ANT plug-in.
  • The Metadata API component page is missing specific information needed for FMT users (folder location, wildcard applicability, etc.)
  • The PDF version is intended for self-contained consumption - offline reference, for instance, but even that version opts for the link instead, making it much less convenient for certain circumstances.
See below for the change comparison.
component table removed

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Metadata types for Workflow components

The Guide for the Migration Tool is pretty incomplete when it comes to workflow stuff (unless you're ok with deploying all workflow elements wholesale every time).  There are a number of things that can be deployed individually.


I remember seeing someone's post about the details of them, but couldn't find it anymore.  Basically they all need to be dot qualified by the object they belong to (similar to custom fields), then listed under the correct type names to be used by the package.xml.  For instance, a Field Update looks like this:

<types>
<members>Lead.Update_Lead_Submitter_Team</members>
<name>WorkflowFieldUpdate</name>
</types>

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Case matters with SFMT


While a big portion of SFDC is not case sensitive, its standalone Ant-based tool IS, every bit of it.  Whenever I stumpled on that, the failure messages weren't that obvious on the reason.  For instance, if I got the object name's case wrong, it would complain about field names on the object not in package.xml.  Yeah, big help here!  I know, I know,  XML is case sensitive... but it's still inconvenient.