Ellis Toms on June 28th 2018
Every deployment in Gearset starts with a comparison between two environments, whether they’re Salesforce organisations or metadata stored in a git repo. Being able to compare the metadata between two environments has lots of advantages, one of the most important being the ability to quickly get an overview of all the ways in which they differ, and selectively deploy changes. That said, we’ve all had the dubious pleasure of working with environments that have diverged more significantly than we’d like, whether it’s due to teams working on features for the same org, a sandbox that hasn’t been refreshed in a long while or inheriting less-than-perfect legacy orgs. This can result in comparisons between orgs with thousands of differences, making it difficult to discern the changes you’re interested in deploying. It can also result in longer comparison times, as all of that metadata needs to be retrieved from Salesforce before it can be compared. We want to make configuring your comparisons and deployments as fast and easy as possible. So to help mitigate this problem, we’ve expanded on the ways you pick which metadata Gearset compares for you. Until today, the granularity of Gearset’s filtering was limited to either a whole metadata type, e.g. CustomObject, or specific named items within that type, e.g. Account. With the latest release, we’ve added the ability for users to add regex patterns to object-level filters and the option to specify items that they want to exclude from the comparison, speeding up deployment configuration and making it easier to ensure you’re only seeing the metadata you’re interested in. Read the rest of this post