How to Deploy Profiles and Fields with SFDX in VSCode

We're deploying from Stage to Prod via VSCode and package.xml. We're concerned of overwriting certain existing Profiles on Production. We haven't updated Stage from Prod in too long.

We still need to deploy those Profiles as they relate to the new fields and other metadata in our package.xml

If we use SFDX (we are thinking of retreating to ant migration for this) still, we need to be assured:
A) that anything that doesn't exist in the Profile on Stage, does not remove it from Profile on Prod
B) that Profiles in Prod will only receive the changes associated with fields in our package.xml

Please help, as I cannot find official documentation for this most important topic.

Best Answer

Profiles only take on changes that are specified in the XML. If you don't specify a permission, it remains whatever it was before the deployment. This allows you to build incremental changes to permissions across multiple packages.

That said, as you move to DX, it may be time to start migrating towards Permission Sets instead. These are far more flexible, can be applied to many users at once, users can have more than one assigned to them, and they work better with packaging.

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] Migrating Fields added to report types using ANT

You can see in the API documentation that the fields are fully captured in the Metadata XML so will nicely migrate using ANT or anything that builds on the Metadata API. You just need to add ReportType to the package.xml and list any report types that you want to migrate.

In the screenshot below you can see our Salesforce Release Management solution, Gearset migrating a changed report type where I have added some fields, removed some others and created a new section. We offer a free no-restriction 30-day trial so you can use Gearset to do your next migration and see if it saves you time.

Salesforce DX – Deploying SFDX-Converted Metadata with Filtered Package.xml

So ... I finally created a sfdx plugin allowing to do that

https://github.com/nvuillam/sfdx_metadatas_filtering

Install it

sfdx plugins:install sfdx_metadatas_filtering
Use it

sfdx metadatafilter:execute -i mdapi_output_dir -p myPackage.xml -o md_api_filtered_output_dir

Full example

sfdx force:source:convert -d tmp/deployDemoQuali/
sfdx metadatafilter:execute -i tmp/deployDemoQuali/ -p myPackage.xml -o tmp/deployDemoQualiFiltered/
sfdx force:mdapi:deploy -d tmp/deployDemoQualiFiltered/ -w 60 -u DemoQuali

Warnings:

all cases are not taken in account yet, please read carefully the README and contribute if you are in a hurry :)
Windows users: sfdx plugin generator is bugged on windows (hardcode call of linux rm instruction) , so you may use Git Bash to run this code ( at least while it installs the plugin dependencies )

EDIT 26/06/2018

It seems that several plugins are necessary to survive in this cruel world, so I joined all the ones I needed to create (including metadata filtering) into https://github.com/nvuillam/sfdx-essentials

This is the only maintained plugin , please use it :)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] Migrating Fields added to report types using ANT

Salesforce DX – Deploying SFDX-Converted Metadata with Filtered Package.xml

EDIT 26/06/2018

Related Topic