How to create Salesforce incremental package.xml automatically?

Question

Does anyone experiment in creating salesforce Package.xml automatically for continuous integration? If there any script or some idea please share.

You know incremental package.xml helps to deploy only the modified files rather than using complete package.xml that redeploy unmodified files as well which takes a lot of time.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Tricky. And not really a programming-related problem, consider cross-posting this to https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/ or maybe even https://devops.stackexchange.com/

I don't think there's no clear answer, you'll have to experiment. Especially that you tagged "migration tool" (so old-school, battle-tested but lower priority Metadata API; seems that all focus is now on SFDX style of deployments). Do you use any version control (ideally Git) or do you hope to somehow compare source & target org, figure out the deltas and deploy only them?

Remember that often SF gets better at detecting "no changes" with every release (how old is your migration tool's jar file?). For example when I deploy my current project to an empty sandbox (exact copy of prod, no custom objects, code etc yet) the initial deploy takes ~7 minutes. But any subsequent deploy with same content or slight changes takes just 3-4. So try to calculate time lost in the grand scheme of things and decide what gains you want to see / how much time you want to spend on experimenting and tweaking the solution.

You could look into dedicated deployment solutions such as Gearset, Autorabit, Odaseva (I'm not affiliated with either and this list is not exhaustive). They often are capable of running a comparison for you.

There are several projects that try to compose package.xml based on Git diff(erence) between two commits. Of course you need to have a repo first and some regime:

• https://github.com/cloudsandbox/sfdx-gen-pack saw presentation about it at Cloudforce London 2019
• https://github.com/Accenture/sfpowerkit seems to have a "diff" command (disclaimer: I used to work for Accenture but not affiliated now, haven't worked on the tool, haven't used it personally)
• https://cumulusci.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ this seems to be interesting and mature. Built by SF employees, not an official tool but used to CI deploy the non-profit packages they build (maybe you heard about Non Profit Starter Pack, especially if you ever considered enabling Person Accounts). I'm not sure if they do delta deployments as such but there seems to be a command that updates package.xml with files in repository so it's a start? https://cumulusci.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#part-4-running-tasks

I'm not saying CumulusCI will be a silver bullet but out of these 3 seems to be most actively maintained ;) But sounds like you'd have to get familiar with SFDX (if not whole thing then at least commands to convert the project back and forth between "source" (SFDX) structure and Metadata API structure

Answer 2

Answering my question by myself: I found git diff master feature/vat | force-dev-tool changeset create vat working!

Thanks to Roman answered in https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/184332/is-there-a-pre-build-solution-for-generating-a-package-xml-from-a-git-repo