Long ago, we waved goodbye to the pain of converting inbound change sets to outbound change sets with Gearset’s clone package feature. With a click of a button, you could promote successful changes to the next environment in your release pipeline. While this was, and still is, a huge time-saver, if you wanted to migrate changes from multiple deployments, you’d have to clone each in turn, or start from scratch with a fresh comparison.
To do away with this repetition and speed up your release cycle, Gearset now lets you combine multiple deployments into a single package.
Kicking off a combined deployment within Gearset
To get started, just head to the Deployment History page. Choose which deployments you’d like to combine by selecting the checkboxes in the column to the left, and click Combine packages... at the bottom of the page.
The resulting dialog lets you review and confirm which deployments you’re combining, and pick a source and target org for the clone operation. Remember, Gearset’s clone deployment works by running a fresh comparison, so you don’t run the risk of overwriting changes. This means Gearset will run a new comparison between your source and target orgs, then select all of the components that were deployed in all of the selected past deployments, before showing you the comparison results. This gives you an opportunity to review each change before you deploy it, while also making sure that you’re seeing up-to-date metadata.
Select the source and target of your new combined deployment package and kick off a fresh comparison to continue. Note that any custom filter and managed package settings from your selected deployments will be automatically combined and applied to your new comparison.
The items from each combined deployment will be pre-selected for you in the new comparison results grid. From this point onwards, the deployment behaves like any other in Gearset - you can add and remove items to and from your deployment, refresh the comparison, save a draft, or carry on to a validation or deployment, all without having to repeat the process for each deployment you’d like to clone.
Try it out and let us know what you think
You can have a go at combining multiple deployment packages on a free 30-day trial of Gearset. Don’t hesitate to get in touch via the live chat if you have any questions about your release process and how Gearset can help.
