Salesforce Tutorial

FlexDeploy provides broad and flexible support for migrating / deploying customizations across Salesforce Orgs. With enterprise DevOps platform features, a rich pipeline, and release automation features FlexDeploy provides a complete DevOps solution for Salesforce.

To name a few, FlexDeploy has support for:

Easy deployment tool for Salesforce No-Code, Low-Code, pro programming, and hybrid App Dev
Data Deployments
All Metadata deployments across Salesforce Orgs.
Partial deployment of Objects using Sub-components
Org to Org Deployments, SCM to Org Deployments
Rich Comparison - Org to Org, Git repot to Org, Supports full comparison, by object type and specific object level comparisons.
Identify and commit changes to the Git repository
Continuous Integration from Sandbox to Git repository, Git repository to Sandbox, Dev, and Production Orgs.
Supports migration of profile permissions specific to components using Sub-components.
Unit Test Automation
Notifications and built-in Approvals, external approval delegation to change management systems like ServiceNow
Fully Automated Pipelines and release management
Test Automation with tools like Selenium, Tosca, HP UFT, Automation Anywhere, and more
Code Scanning capabilities with PMD, Checkmarx
Identify all the Profiles for the objects that are in the package and add the profiles automatically to your package.
Dependency analysis
Easy rollbacks
Salesforce DX Ready

Objective

The goal of the tutorial is to automate the deployment of Salesforce metadata customizations from one Salesforce Org (Sandbox or Development) to another Salesforce Org. This automation will include:

Identifying the Changes performed on the Salesforce Org and pushing changes to a Git Repository
Building a package from the repository Git repository or Salesforce Org
deploying the changes to other Salesforce Orgs.

Once the configuration is complete we will walk through the build and deployment life-cycle for managing Salesforce Changes

Checklist

Checklist Items	Description

Checklist Items

Description

Flexdeploy

FlexDeploy installation completed.

Salesforce Orgs

Connectivity details for Salesforce Orgs.

User email
Password
Security Token

GIT Repository (Optional)

Git repository information. If you would like to Commit or Sync your sandbox to git repository.

If you have user changing in Saleforce Org and developers commiting to Git from their IDEs. FlexDeploy support the hybrid development and allow you to migrate changes together or sequentially.

GIT URL
Username
Password

Create Salesforce Project using Blueprint

The assumption is that you have FlexDeploy installed and ready for use. When logged into FlexDeploy, you will see the Home page. Click on the + icon on the top and click “Create Project” to create a new project.

The screen displays the list of blueprints supported by FlexDeploy. Search and click on Salesforce.

General Configuration

Fill in the values to create a new Salesforce project and click Confirm. We will walk through each property in the blow sections.

Project Info

Property Name	Value for this tutorial	Description
Salesforce Org Name	Tutorial01	The name of the Salesforce Org. This is normally your company name or application name if you have multiple Salesforce Orgs in your company. We will use this for Project Name in FlexDeploy.
Description	Tutorial01	Brief description of the Salesforce Org

Build Option

Select One of the Build options based on how you would like to source the content of files for the package creation.

Property Name	Value for this tutorial	Description
Salesforce Org	Not Selected	Select, if sourcing directly from Salesforce Org (Normally Sandbox or Develop).
SCM Repository	Selected	Select, if sourcing from Git repository.

Source Control

This section is only applicable if you select Build Option as SCM Repository. Click on the Source Repository dropdown. If you have already created a connection to your source code repository, select it from the list. Enter the sparse checkout folder, if any.

Otherwise, add one by clicking on “Create new Source Repository”. Enter the sparse checkout folders script, if any.

Create Source Control Repository (Git) Inputs Info

Field	Required	Description
Name	Yes	Give a Name to this SCM instance to refer in FlexDeploy. Used to display in FlexDeploy
Code	Yes	Give a technical code for the instance, without any spaces. The codes are available as variables to shell and Groovy scripts in FlexDeploy, and therefore needs to comply with their limitations.
Source Control Type	Yes	Type of Source Control Management System. We will use Git for this tutorial.
Description	No
SCM Properties	Yes	The remaining properties are specific to the selected SCM. Provide these as per your Git reposisotry For Git: Git URL Git User Git Password Git Timeout (optional) Git File Content (optional) Git File Content Commit URL (optional)

We selected the SCM type as GIT. The properties related to the GIT source control management will be displayed on the screen.

Click on Create New Credential to create a new credential password for the GIT password. Enter the credential Name which is a unique name to identify the password. In the secret text, enter the password and click on Save.

After saving the credential, click on Save again on the SCM instance. Do a Test Connection. The green color ticket mark will show that the connection is successful.

Enter the sparse checkout folder value, if any.

Build and Deployment information

Leave the Endpoint selection as LOCALHOST as we will be executing the build and deploy operations on the same server as FlexDeploy.

If you are creating Creating project for the first time, you will not have the SF Cloud Account. You can create it.

Click on the Confirm. Select the Parent Folder from the list and click on Create.

We will be able to see the project created under the given Parent Folder path. That’s it. Configuration completed.

We can see the Folder hierarchy at the top of the project.

Review Configurations

We need to review and adjust configurations for the Topology Overview, Project, and Cloud Account.

Topology

Navigate to the Topology from the Menu. The Page with the Target Groups, Environments and Endpoints sections will be displayed. Choose a Target Group on the left. You will see a list of Environments on the right with colored circles representing each Target.

Click on Salesforce Target Group and click on the Development Environment

Color coding represents:

RED - The Endpoint is not configured
YELLOW - some of the required properties are not set,
GREEN - all required properties are set and the Endpoint is configured

Target Properties

Clicking the environment row for DEV allows modifying the Endpoint and properties.

Cloud Accounts

Click on the Integrations under Topology and then Cloud. Add all the Salesforce Orgs and go back to Topology Overview and map the Salesforce Account for the environment. You would need the User Name, Password, and API Security Token to start with. All other information is optional.

Refer to Cloud Accounts documentation for more information on configuring Cloud Accounts.

Project Configuration

Go back to the Projects Menu and click on the Configuration tab to review each section and update as needed. In most cases, no need to update any of these. If you have multiple SCM branches, you need to add them under Source Control and Branches

That completes the one-time configuration. The next section is your daily execution.

Execution

This section explains how to identify and review changes by comparing the Salesforce Orgs, Creating a package, and then deploying the package to other environments. These can be completely automated using CI and CD pipelines in FlexDeploy if needed.

Identify and review the changes

Click on the Salesforce Org Management tab. There are three sub-tabs.

SCM to Org (Only available if SCM-based project)
Org to Org
Package to Org

Go to the SCM to Org tab to compare the changes between your Git repo branch and any of your Orgs.

There are 3 different options for searching / comparing.

Click on the Compare button itself to list all the files and pick one or many files to compare.
Click on Object Type to select and quickly compare based on the Object types like Apex Class, Custom Object, etc.
Click on Full Compare to do a full comparison of your Git repo and your Salesforce Og.

When you click on the Compare button itself, you will see a list of files. You can search and select one or many to Compare.

Since we made changes to the case object in the Salesforce org and want to pull that changes to the SCM, we searched for the case and then select the desired metadata i.e custom object (Case), and click Compare.

FlexDeploy compares the metadata selected in the Git repository branch with Salesforce Org.

Once you expand, the compare results will display and it will denote what exactly changed. You can click on the maximize icon to expand to full screen.

You can review each change and who and when they made the change. Once the review is completed, select the file by clicking on the File Name and then click on Commit Selected button.

You can Select an existing package to add these files to or create a new package and add it. Once you enter the commit message, click on the Commit button.

Now The metadata file is selected and committed to the git repository, click on the Packages screen.

From this Packages screen, either a package can be created and add files to the package.

Create a package

On the package screen, click on create button to create a new package.

Enter the package name and add files.

Click on Add Files to add the files that are populated from the SCM repository. We can also create new files at the package level.

Click on the file name directly to add the file to the package. Else, use the filter file option to search for the specific file and select that to add to the package. Click on save.

Alternatively, the file can be selected and added to the package by the git revision by clicking on the BY REVISION tab and selecting the commit Id.

We can see the files added to the package under the package file screen.

Building Package

Click on the Execution tab to submit the build request for that package. Click on Build.

The Build Request Form is displayed. Click on the “Submit” button for the build to execute.

Here you can make note of build execution details for our package. To view more detail, click on the generated Execution Id.

On the Steps tab, we see the execution details of our build workflow.

After the build completes we can see the artifact on the Artifacts tab, and see details of the files within it on the Files tab.

Deploying Packages

In the previous module, we performed builds of one package. In this module, we will perform deployments of that package into the Development Environment.

To submit the deploy request for a package, first, click on the Execution tab of the Tutorial 01 Project. Click on the icon as shown in the image below will launch the deploy request form for that project version 1.0.1.

Select the environment Development. Click on Submit button to submit the deployment for the package Tutorial sample.

We can see all the files that we selected got successfully deployed to the Dev Environment.

Congratulations, you have completed the Salesforce deployment!

Next, configure your release and pipeline to migrate changes through environments with quality gates.