Custom Metadata Records Deployment From Apex Code

Custom Metadata Records Deployment From Apex Code

• 1.
  MDT Records Deployments Deploying custommetadata records from Apex Code 2018
• 2.
  Introduction Bohdan Dovhan -Senior Salesforce Developer and Salesforce Development Team Lead Salesforce Certified Development Lifecycle & Deployment Designer Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder 8 years of Development experience 5 years of Development on Salesforce platform
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  Long-long time ago Long-longtime ago in far-far away galaxy there were developers working on a very-very legacy project on an internal Salesforce customizations. Later that client company was acquired by a bigger company and a new integration with a new external system of a bigger company was requested to be established. This integration involved configuration records of country and state codes in external database. Implementation of another subsidiary company which was also acquired by a bigger company and which also used Salesforce, used custom objects to store those country and code mappings. However, custom objects records are not deployable, so these configuration mappings cannot be migrated from sandbox to production environment during deployment. Decision was made to convert those records from Custom Object and Custom Metadata and to delegate this task to Junior Developer.
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  Unknown feature Discovery wasmade that developers are not aware of of custom metadata records deployment feature and might assume that team lead expect them to convert those 5000 records manually. Since I was surprised that such feature is not known amongst Salesforce Developers, I decided to prepare this talk. Since this feature was introduced more than year and a half ago, I supposed that everyone knows about it which apparently is not completely true statement.
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  Data Example Org baseddevelopment vs. source driven development. In a traditional SF Dev Lifecycle, application builders use sandboxes to create and test changes. Source of truth is either production or any sandbox containing most recent version of code and customization. With Salesforce DX, you might use source driven development using latest versions from a centralized source control system like GIT or SVN.
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  Operations class Salesforce Summer17 release introduced Metadata namespace and Operations class inside it with the following capabilities: 1. Retrieval and deployment of custom metadata records 2. Retrieval and deployment of layouts Well to retrieve custom metadata records we could just use SOQL Retrieval and deployments of layouts is only relevant to package developers. The most important feature here is ability to deploy custom metadata records by Apex code
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  Metadata Loader Wait, can’twe just use standard salesforce Custom Metadata Record Uploader package page? Yes, but you will have to deploy this package to your organization and prepare CSV file. Still, this application uses Metadata API under the hood while it could use Metadata.Operations class.
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  Metadata API Wait, can’twe just use Metadata API? Yes, but in such case you will have to add your organization endpoint to remote site settings and to use complex WSDL classes for a simple task. Also you can use Andrew Fawcett library which also utilizes Metadata API. Since Metadata.Operations class doesn’t support deletion of metadata records, if you need to delete custom metadata records you would still use Metadata API or libraries based on it
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  Records deployment Let’s assumethere are some mappings stored in Custom Objects records or Custom Settings. Then enqueueDeployment method of Metadata.Operations class can be leveraged to write a simple and concise code to convert those records into Custom Metadata records and those metadata records can be migrated using ANT Migration Tool. Since in most cases you don’t need to delete custom metadata records, this is a perfect fit for this task. In case if you need to delete custom metadata records you could either build destructiveChanges.xml and delete them using ANT Migration Tool or leverage Metadata API. Deployment may either create a new custom metadata record or update existing custom metadata records, depending on the uniqueness of the fullName attribute. If there is a custom metadata record with a given DeveloperName, then that particular record will be updated with new values during deployment but if such a record doesn’t exist, then a new record will be created during the deployment process. Also, the label attribute is, in fact, required even though it is not populated in the example from documentation. I spent some time trying to figure this out when I was attempting to deploy custom metadata records by Apex code, for the very first time.
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  Fields population In orderto populate a custom field on a Custom Metadata record, CustomMetadataValue model should be instantiated and then it should be added to custom metadata record values. However, to populate standard field on a Custom Metadata record one has to populate the label and fullName attributes directly on a Custom Metadata record. Label and fullName attributes correspond to MasterLabel and DeveloperName standard fields even though their names differ. private Metadata.CustomMetadata makeMDTRecord(Sobject r) { Metadata.CustomMetadata customMetadata = new Metadata.CustomMetadata(); customMetadata.fullName = populateName( r ); customMetadata.label = populateLabel( r ); for (SObjectField key: this.mappings.keySet() ) { Metadata.CustomMetadataValue customField = new Metadata.CustomMetadataValue(); customField.field = String.valueOf(this.mappings.get(key) ); customField.value = r.get(key); customMetadata.values.add(customField); } return customMetadata; }
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  Update and Deploy publicId updateAndDeployMetadata(List<SObject> sourceRecords, SObjectType dest, Map<SObjectField, SObjectField> mappings, String fullNameDef, String labelDef ) { Metadata.DeployContainer mdContainer = new Metadata.DeployContainer(); this.mappings = mappings; this.destName = dest.getDescribe().getName(); this.fullNameParts = fullNameDef.split('+’); this.labelParts = labelDef.split('+'); if( sourceRecords != null && !sourceRecords.isEmpty() ) { this.fields = sourceRecords[0].getSObjectType().getDescribe().fields.getMap(); for (SObject r: sourceRecords ) { mdContainer.addMetadata(makeMDTRecord(r)); } return Metadata.Operations.enqueueDeployment(mdContainer, null); } return null; }
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  Code Example The finalexample of code for records conversion is following new MD().updateAndDeployMetadata( [ SELECT Field1__c, Field2__c, Field3__c, Field4__c FROM Object__c ], CustomMetadata__mdt.sObjectType, new Map<SObjectField, SObjectField>{ Object__c.Field1__c=> CustomMetadata__mdt.Field1__c, Object__c.Field2__c=> CustomMetadata__mdt.Field2__c, Object__c.Field3__c=> CustomMetadata__mdt.Field3__c, Object__c.Field4__c => CustomMetadata__mdt.Field4__c }, 'X+Field1__c+_+Field2__c’, 'Field3__c+ +Field4__c ' );
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  Metadata Relations Also, whenyou need to populate a Custom Metadata relationship, you need to use DeveloperName from the corresponding parent records instead of an identifier, which might seem odd since everywhere else in Apex you either use Salesforce Id or External Id to populate relationships. The same applies when you need to populate a Entity or Field relationship, the DeveloperName from the corresponding Entity or Field should be used instead of Ids.
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  Undocumented limit There aresome undocumented limitations on a number of custom metadata records which can be deployed by one call of a  enqueueDeployment method of Operations class. The actual number depends on the data included in the custom metadata records, and in my case I was able to deploy around 1,488 custom metadata records at one time while trying to insert or update 1,489 records yielded from an Salesforce System UnexpectedException Error. Splitting custom metadata records into chunks and invoking a enqueueDeployment method several times helps to deal with the issue
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  Package developers There is“Deploy Metadata from Non-Certified Package Versions via Apex” checkbox setting, which enables beta packages to perform a custom metadata records deployment from Apex code. This checkbox can be found in Setup Build Develop Apex Settings menu in the setup configuration.
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  Package developers So ifyou need to test the beta version of your developed managed package before passing a security review, you will have to check this checkbox and save your settings on every organization where you install a beta version of your package.
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  Metadata Relations Metadata Relationshipsprovide very convenient and useful way to dynamically store references to SObjects and Fields. So you don’t need anymore to store However, only some standard Objects are supported, so User object and User fields are not supported.
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  Conclusion As we canconclude now, the ability to deploy customization data directly from Apex code is a really great and astonishing feature which has been available since the version 40 of Salesforce API. We have considered here several use cases where this might be needed. Sometimes this can be useful for developing interface to deploy custom metadata records from user experience, or this can be much more useful and beneficial if you ever need to convert your existing customization data, stored in Custom Objects or Custom Settings, in order to be able to include them into deployment scripts.
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  References1. https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=custommetadatatypes_dataloader.htm&type=5 2. https://corevalue.net/deploying-custom-metadata-records-apex-code/ 3. https://patlatus.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/convert-custom-object-records-to-custom-meta 4. https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.208.0.apexcode.meta/apexcode/apex_c 5. https://patlatus.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/most-wanted-salesforce-feature-ever-bye-bye- 6. https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Patlatus/53ce49fde265c0aa3d0f2c3fdda8b900/raw/bb1 7. https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Patlatus/bb4c964f72ddfb60bbd4710bb34597b9/raw/9c
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  References8. https://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=0873A000000cNVjQAM 9.