Dependencies are one of the most common causes of failed Salesforce deployments. The various types of Salesforce metadata object can reference each other in a large number of different ways. It’s not always obvious from a casual inspection which objects need to be deployed alongside each other in order to cause a deployment to succeed.
Gearset has a feature that makes it possible to view these dependencies as a tree in the comparison view. This makes it much easier to see how objects relate, and to include everything necessary for a successful deployment. What’s more, Gearset will check a deployment prior to uploading to Salesforce to check if any necessary dependencies are missing, and, if they are, allow you to add them into the package. In addition to saving time spent waiting while Salesforce would otherwise fail the deployment, this also makes it easy to understand orgs and pick the items that need to be deployed.
We’re constantly working on improving the coverage of the dependency analysis to support to more Salesforce object types. Guided by our service metrics, we’ve been focusing on those dependencies that cause users the most issues. Recently, we’ve extended support for workflows so workflow field updates and tasks will depend on the appropriate custom and standard object fields, as well as making sure that ListViews that use Queues display the appropriate dependencies. This makes all of these objects much easier to deploy: Gearset will spot a deployment that uses them and make sure that all the dependencies are included.
We’re planning on continuing to extend our dependency analysis over the coming months. Our goal is to eventually catch every error before it’s sent to Salesforce, removing the tedious manual work of ensuring that every deployment covers all the objects it needs.
Follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with all the latest news, or check out our product roadmap.
As always, we’d love to get your feedback. Visit our feedback forum to add your comments and suggestions, or drop us an email at [email protected] and give us your thoughts!