Manage profile metadata changes and versioning in Git

Anyone who has implemented Salesforce source control before knows just how challenging it can be to manage profile changes and versioning in Git.

Profile is so pervasive in that a single profile can reference almost any other metadata types in the org. A simple profile, when externalized to a git repository, can result in an xml file with thousands of lines. Being so large combined with being frequently modified make Profile difficult to manage on a regular basis, especially when multiple developers need to make changes to the same part of a Profile file at the same time which results in even more time spent on merging and conflict resolution.

In addition, editing and merging large xml files can be a very technical process which represents a barrier of adoption for less technical admins in your team.

In this blog post, we will show you how to manage Profiles changes in a simpler and more effective way using ClickDeploy.io.

Scenario

Let’s go through an example. Alice is a developer/admin on your Salesforce team. Alice created a new custom field Account.SLA__c in her sandbox and would like to commit the field together with its field level security permissions to Git.

Commit profile changes to Git

First, Alice would create a new deployment, like below:

Notice how Alice selected the profile together with the custom field. Upon clicking on “Commit to Git Branch”, ClickDeploy will commit the SLA__c field and only part of the Admin profile that is related to the SLA__c field to Git. Once the commit completes, Alice clicks on the “Review Changes” button to view the exact differences between the committed feature branch (clickdeploy_alice_16793) and the master branch, like below:

The changes above look clear and as expected. Alice can either merge the changes to master branch or submit a pull request for her team to review.

Deploy profiles from Git to Salesforce

Now that your Profile changes are in Git, you can deploy Profiles from Git to Salesforce just as similar to how you would deploy other metadata types. Simply create a new deployment from Git to Salesforce, deploy everything in the branch or select just certain Profiles to deploy.

As you can see, Profile is no doubt one of the the most complex metadata types within your Salesforce orgs. Manually editing and committing Profile changes is not only time consuming but also error prone. ClickDeploy significantly simplifies the process and allows both developers as well as less technical admins to move profile changes to Git, all in just a few clicks.

Are you ready to explore how ClickDeploy can help you streamline your release processes to deliver faster and more frequent deployments to your customers? Use your Salesforce login to sign up for a three-week trial. ClickDeploy is secure and 100% cloud-based, so you can try it out for free without installing anything on your Salesforce org.