Salesforce source control that empowers admins.

No git commands. No xml editing. No dev-ops engineers.

In the previous blog post, we showed you how to set up Salesforce source control and CI process in 5 minutes. After just a few clicks, you would have a process that looks like this:

To recap, the major change in this process compared to the traditional Salesforce change sets is that your admins and developers no longer deploy directly from Sandbox to Production. Instead, they would move changes from Salesforce sandboxes to your GitHub repository.

While the power and flexibility that Git provides is undeniable, the biggest challenge remains:

How can my less technical Salesforce admins move changes to GIT ?

Reversing click configurations back into code? editing XML files, learning git commands, dealing with conflicts ? This is a time consuming process even for developers and simply not practical for Salesforce admins. In the end, Salesforce’s power lies in Clicks, not Code.

For many Salesforce teams around the world, this is perhaps the biggest barrier to adopting source control and continuos integration.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how ClickDeploy helps to streamline your change process, enable full audit history, approval and code review. We made it extremely simple and intuitive for your team to work with Git by clicks.

No code. No Xml editing. No Git commands.

How it works

Assume you’ve just received a request to update a validation rule and add a new field to Employee__c object. You first go to your personal dev sandbox and make the necessary changes using Salesforce setup UI. After you’ve tested and are happy with your setup, it is time to move the configuration through the change process.

In ClickDeploy.io, create a new deployment, like this:

Select the configuration changes that you wish to move to Git, like this:

Click Commit to Git Branch and ClickDeploy will commit the configuration changes to your target Git Branch.

Hit Review Changes and create a pull request, like this:

The diff generated is crystal clear and everyone in your team can understand the change instantly.

ClickDeploy also tracks the pull request for you. Notice how the validation rule was changed without updating the error message ? That’s what code review is for and Minh, one of the team members, has made just the right review comment above.

To address Minh’s comment, simply update the validation rule in your dev sandbox and click Commit to Git Branch again. ClickDeploy will automatically update the pull request to reflect the subsequent change and notify your team for approval. Once the pull request is approved, a team member with the right permission can merge to master by a single click in GitHub. At which point, CI jobs will kick in and take care of the rest.

As you can see, a process that used to take hours now takes a few clicks using ClickDeploy.io. And what did we just gain compared to the old Salesforce change sets?

• Line-by-line code review. Every member in your team is completely in sync of the changes in progress.
• Iterate through the change process in a declarative fashion.
• No more code clobbering. GitHub catches all merge conflicts.
• For the first time, you know exactly which line of code was changed, by whom, at which point in time. Just look at GitHub commit log.
• Your metadata is incrementally backed up and you can revert to any previous states / sub states.
• Want to sync an outdated sandbox? Just deploy master to your sandbox.
• There was no code, no xml editing, no Git commands.

Salesforce’s power lies in Clicks, not Code. And so should its change process.

Do you have a growing Salesforce team and want to leverage source control ? Try ClickDeploy.io today. Setup CI process in minutes. No sign up or installations needed.