ant migration tool salesforce package xml

And as any Salesforce developer can tell you, getting a change set to validate, especially under pressure can take hours and a lot of manual trial and error. Most teams using Salesforce today do not have any kind of source control or backups which they can quickly fall back on. Anyone who has ever had to do a rollback under the gun knows how desperate and stressful it can be. It’s a small upfront investment but it pays major dividends when something does go wrong.

Having a pre-validated rollback ready to go allows teams to deploy with confidence. Imagine a multi-million dollar investment in Salesforce going down without speedy recourse. So having a proper release management strategy with the capability to undo changes is fairly crucial. For many of our customers, if Salesforce is down or buggy, trucks stop, food spoils, revenue is lost and customers get angry. Now before you suggest that this is overly cautious and paranoid, consider this: Salesforce is mission critical to your business. This gives them the confidence to release knowing that they have a well tested and understood backup plan. When they push to prod, they have experience rolling back the exact release they are deploying and they know that it can be undone if need be. They could then validate that this deployment can be rolled back should anything go wrong. They create the destructiveChanges.xml and a corresponding package.xml to reverse the deployment. As soon as they’ve done that deployment they would create a reverse deployment which rolls back those changes. Next, they would build a package.xml and deploy all of their changes for the release for that into the newly created sandbox using the Ant migration tool for Salesforce.

The validation and testing that a team can do on such an out of date sandbox is frankly rather risky. Far too many of our customers have sandboxes that have not been refreshed in months or years. Before each release they spin up a sandbox directly from production to establish as close an approximation of production as possible. Pre-Validating the Release and Rollback with Ant We hadn’t yet encountered this kind of diligence yet so we thought we’d share it as an interesting practice for teams that want to be extra cautious with their Salesforce releases. Not only do they pre-validate every major release in a recently created sandbox before pushing to production (something that many teams do), they also pre-validate the rollback of said release before they push the release to production (which very few teams do). Have you ever had to do a Salesforce rollback while the clock was ticking? It’s not very fun! That’s why for this week’s CTO Corner we wanted to relay a quick story from a fairly advanced Salesforce team that we met recently.

Ant migration tool salesforce package xml