Created By: Nirmal Christopher
SFDC Technical consultant
Change Sets and Deployment Production
What is a Change set???
A change set is a means by which one organization can send customizations to another organization.
- An outbound change set is a change set created in the organization you are logged into and want to send to another organization.
- An inbound change set is a change set that has been sent from another organization to the organization you are logged into.
- Change sets can only contain modifications you can make through the setup menu.
- Change sets may contain customizations to existing components or new components, but can't be used to delete or rename components.
Let me walk you through the steps involved in deploying components
from sandbox to production
Step #1:
The
first step involved in deployment from sandbox to production is to make sure
proper deployment connections has been made in the sandbox instance and
production instance.
Navigate as follows
User Menu->Setup->App
Setup->Deploy->Deployment Connections. Please refer the screen
shot below for further clarification.
Here you can
see the list of connections available for sandbox production seems the connection to
production environment is already active.
·
A deployment connection is automatically created between all
related organizations whenever a sandbox is created.
·
Each organization must be authorized to send and receive change
sets.
·
The deployment connection list shows which organizations can
upload changes to this organization, and which organizations allow this
organization to upload changes to them.
Step #2
The step 2 would be creating outbound change set and its
components in sandbox.
Please make sure that Allow inbound changes option is checked
true in Production org in deployment connections option else you will get and
error message if you try to upload the components into the production org. Refer the screen shot below.
You can navigate the
outbound change set component as follows
User Menu->Setup->App Setup->Deploy->Out Bound changes set.
Click New to create a new outbound change set.
It will navigate to a screen where you can see a Name field(Required field) and
description field. Fill the fields and click Save.
It will navigate to a
page like this (refer the screenshot below).
Now click ADD to select the list of components it
will navigate to another page where you will find a dropdown list which will
show the list available components for Example we will consider a simple workflow
for deployment.
After choosing
workflow rule from the drop down you can see the list of all workflows
available for deployment. Choose the required workflows click add to change
set.
Now the change set is
created for deployment we have to make sure that the dependent components for
that chosen components is also added in the outbound change set. To achieve
this click on the View/Add Dependencies
Button will again navigate to the previous page which will show the list of
dependent components. Select all the components available and click add to change set button and make sure all
the dependent components are added in the change set.
Choose appropriate
profiles required in the same change set. And click the upload button. Now the
components will be added in the production org and a mail will be sent to the
Sandbox administrator.
Step #3:
The deployment time
might vary from few minutes to few hours. Now log in into production org and
navigate to inbound change sets as follows
User Menu->Setup->App
Setup->Deploy->Inbound changeset
Now the user will be able to see the list or
inbound change sets which we sent from sandbox. Will be available in Change Sets Awaiting
Deployment section.
Click
the link for the inbound change set in this section now the screen will
navigate to the list of components available there you can see Validate and Deploy buttons. Pressing validate button will mock the changes
which will be made in the system after deployment and it produces results. So
its always a good practice to choose validate button before deploying. If the
result is success then the change set is ready to deploy now.
Point
to remember before deploying
·
Deployment
should be done in a sequential order to
avoid errors I.e in this order
·
Custom
Objects
·
Custom
fields
·
Profiles
·
Roles
·
Templates
·
Pagelayouts
·
Record Types
·
Email Alerts
·
Field
Updates
·
Workflow
rules
·
VF pages
·
Test Classes
·
Classes
·
Triggers
·
Validation
Rules.
If you press the view dependency button all
the available components will be pulled sequentially so the user really have to
mind the sequence.
