Custom metadata filters are a powerful way to optimise your workflow with Gearset. With a custom filter you can choose which metadata is retrived from Salesforce, speeding up comparisons between your orgs and making it easier to find the changes you’re interested in deploying.
Until now, these filters were unique to each user. With the latest release, custom filters are now shared amongst teams, making it easier for teams to collaborate and ensure they’re all using the same filters for their deployments.
Creating a custom filter
When running a comparison, by default Gearset compares the most common metadata types between your source and target. This includes Custom Objects, Profiles, Permissions and Apex code. If you want more control over what metadata is compared, you can create a custom metadata filter.
Creating a custom filter is a matter of clicks - simply select the metadata types you’re interested in, give it a name, and click save. Custom filters can also be used for automation jobs, such as continuous integration, and org change monitoring. Once you save a filter, it will be available across Gearset in any place that allows you to specify a metadata filter.
For a more detailed explanation on managing custom filters, see our documentation.
Viewing shared filters
One of the most common feature requests for custom filters was that teams wanted to share them. This was partly for efficiency when setting up new team members, and also as a way of ensuring consistency by allowing everyone to easily use the same filters for their deployments.
With the latest release of the app, filters are now shared amongst teams. When you open up the custom filter dialogue, you’ll now see three categories:
- Standard filters: the default filters from Gearset
- My filters: filters you have created
- Shared with me: filters created by members of your team
You’ll be able to select any of these filters and use them across your deployments and automation jobs, just like before. Anyone in the team can create or edit shared filters.
If you’re in a big team, you may find that you have quite a few more filters showing up in your results after this update. With a little bit of co-ordination, you’ll quickly be able to reduce down this number and create a simple shared set for the whole team to use - many teams will have duplicates for each team member which you will now be able to consolidate.
A quick note on automation jobs
Some of Gearset’s automation jobs, such as CI or org monitoring, can use custom filters to define the metadata they operate on. Once a job has been created, it will remember the metadata that was defined in the filter, even if that filter is later modified or deleted - no need to worry that changing a filter will cause an existing CI job to suddenly change its behaviour!
Want to improve your team’s metadata handling? Try it out for yourself with a 30-day free trial of Gearset.