Salesforce Toolkit

We have a few productive tools that make the life easier for Salesforce Administrator and Consultant. Salesforce Tool Kit is one of those tools.

Overview of Salesforce Toolkit: 

We have a few productive tools that make the life easier for Salesforce Administrator and Consultant. Salesforce Tool Kit is one of those tools. Everything is simple in Salesforce but certain jobs are time consuming like creating more than 100 fields at a time, activating and deactivating the large number of workflow and validation rules. With Salesforce Tool Kit, these kinds of tasks become a lot easier.

The Salesforce Toolkit is a collection of Heroku hosted applications that support various Salesforce processes and tasks. It gives the succour for common consulting processes and tasks – from diagnosing your org, comparing environments to activate and deactivate the Salesforce components. Salesforce Toolkit is fully open source. It is accessed in cloud by using the link http://sftoolkit.co/.

It contains following Applications,

  1. Org Doctor
  2. Org Compare
  3. Data Compare
  4. Switch
  5. Schema Lister
  6. Field Creator
  7. Package Builder
salesforce toolkit

Org Doctor: 

Org Doctor analyses the Salesforce Org and presents a report based on the best-practices and any trouble areas that may need get address. It’s useful for high-level health-checks, analysis of how to improve performance and general maintenance overheads for your Org. It used to easily monitor your Orgs very often.

We need the system administration permission to pull metrics document.

Step 1:

  • From Salesforce Tool Kit page, click on “Org Doctor” link
salesforce toolkit

Step 2:

  • Check “I am a Salesforce Administrator” checkbox and choose the “check my Production Org or check my Sandbox Org” option form the picklist values.
  • Click the “SIGN IN WITH SALESFORCE” button.
salesforce toolkit

Step 3:

  • Enter your “Username and Password” of Salesforce Org and click on “Log In” button.

Step: 4

  1. Finally, the high-level health-checks report sent to your e-mail.
  2. The health check report contains various section and each section will have the percentage of best practices followed.
  3. The generated result will be highlighted in “Green, Yellow and Red” color.
  4. Green indicates that greater than 75% of best practices followed in Org.
  5. Yellow indicates the 33% to 75% of best practices followed in Org.
  6. Red indicates that lesser than 33% of best practices followed in Org.
salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit

Org compare: 

Org compare tool uses the Salesforce “Tooling API” or “Metadata API” (user selection) to compare metadata between “Two Orgs” or “Two environments”. It compares the metadata of “Two Orgs” or “Two environments” and presents the differences. It’s very useful for ‘pre-deployment’ change-set and package setup, as well as ‘post-deployment’ validation.

We need the system administrator permission on both the Orgs to use this application.

Step: 1 

  • From Salesforce Tool Kit page, click on “Org Compare” link.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 2 

  1. Select the appropriate values in “Org One” and “Org Two” field (Production or Sandbox).
  2. Click on the Login button in Org One and enter your “Username and Password” and click on login button.
  3. Click the Login button in Org Two and enter your “Username and Password” and click login button.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 3 

  • Click the “Compare Orgs” button, before select the “Metadata API or Tooling API” in drop down.

Metadata API: 

  • The “Metadata API” is slower but returns the full set of queryable metadata for your Org. Use the “Metadata API” if there are components not contained in the “Tooling API” that we would like to compare. This should be used if we want a true full comparison between two Orgs.

Tooling API: 

  • The “Tooling API” is much faster in querying the metadata and will return the org compare results a lot faster. However, the “Tooling API” currently only supports code-based metadata, so is limited to the following types of metadata.

The “Metadata API” is limited to 5,000 files retrieved in a single call.

salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit

Step: 4 

  • Select the “Show All Components” option in picklist and click on any component you want to compare (Ex: appMenus)
salesforce toolkit

Step: 5 

  1. Click on any one metadata (Ex: AppSwitcher.appMenu)
  2. Finally, comparing the metadata of two different environments
salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit

Data compare: 

Data compare uses the Salesforce “REST API” to query objects in your databases and compare the data between “Two Orgs” or “Two Environment”. It is useful for post-data migrations, and it ensures successful migration of data and whether all rows match. It also allows for reference tables and custom settings to be matched and managed.

None of your organization data is captured or kept from running this tool. Because this tool is querying data in your Salesforce Org, if we are running on behalf of a client or do not own the data, it is important to ensure people are aware that another cloud-based tool is accessing your Salesforce data.

We need to be a System Administrator in both Orgs to use this application.

Step: 1 

  • From Salesforce Tool Kit page, click on the “Data Compare” link
salesforce toolkit

Step: 2 

  1. Select the appropriate values in “Org One” and “Org Two” field (Production or Sandbox).
  2. Click on Login button in Org One and enter your “Username and Password” and click on login button.
  3. Click on Login button in Org Two and enter your “Username and Password” and click on login button.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 3 

  • Click on “Begin Compare” button and select the Object to compare
salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit

Step: 4 

  • Select the fields to compare data and click on “Compare Data” button
salesforce toolkit

Step: 5 

  • Finally, we get the data comparison for selected fields
salesforce toolkit

 Switch: 

The Switch tool helps to easily enable and disable components in your Salesforce Org – “Workflows, Triggers, Process builder, and Validation Rules”. Very useful when doing data migrations and needing to disable certain automation.

We can easily “Rollback” to original.

Step: 1 

  • From Salesforce Tool Kit page, click on “Switch” link
salesforce toolkit

Step: 2 

  • Select the Environment as “Production or Sandbox”.
  • Click on Login button and enter your “Username and Password” and click on login button.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 3 

  • Click on “Get Metadata” button.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 4 

  • Select the tab “Validation rule” or “Workflows” or “Process Flows” or “Triggers”.
  • To Activate or Deactivate the rule to click on “ON or OFF” button next to the rule name.
salesforce toolkit
  • After clicking the “ON or OFF” button, click “Deploy changes” button
salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit

Step: 5 

  • Finally, changes are updated to your Salesforce ORG.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 6 

  • If we want to roll your changes, click “ROLL BACK TO ORGINAL” button.
salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit

Schema lister:

The schema lister app provides the list of objects, fields, API Name, data type and help text within your Salesforce Org. It provides the ability to export this to an Excel file. This is useful for documentation purposes, or if needed to provide schema details to an external party.

Step: 1

  • From Salesforce Tool Kit page, click on “Schema Lister” link.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 2

  • Select the Environment as “Production or Sandbox”.
  • Click on “Login to Salesforce with oauth” button and enter your “Username and Password” and click on login button.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 3 

  • Click on “Get Schema” button.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 4 

  • Finally, will get the list of objects, fields, API Name, data type and help text from within your Salesforce Org
salesforce toolkit

Field creator: 

This tool helps to easily set up and create custom fields to your Salesforce environment. We can create fields for standard and custom objects, set permissions and deploy. It is much easier than doing it one by one within Salesforce.

Note: We can’t deploy the fields created using this tool, directly to active Production Orgs as this tool uses Tooling API method. We should create them in a sandbox and then deploy them to production.

Step: 1

  • From Salesforce Tool Kit page, click on “Field Creator” link
salesforce toolkit

Step: 2

  1. Select the Environment as “Production(Developer) or Sandbox”.
  2. Click on Login button and enter your “Username and Password” and click on login button.

Step: 3 

  • Click on “Query list of objects” button and select any object in “Select Object” field.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 4

  1. Enter the field “Label name, API, Data type, Options and Profiles permission,”.
  2. If we want to create more field in single shot, click “Add Row” button.
salesforce toolkit
  • To set field option and profile permission
salesforce toolkit
salesforce toolkit

Step: 5 

  • Once entered field details, click on “Deploy fields” button.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 6 

  • Finally, fields get created in your Salesforce ORG.
salesforce toolkit

Limitation: 

The following Relationship fields and Data types can’t be created using “Field Creator” tool.

  1. Auto Number
  2. Formula
  3. Roll-Up Summary
  4. Lookup Relationship
  5. Master-Detail Relationship
  6. External Look Relationship
  7. Text(Encrypted)

Package builder: 

The Salesforce “Metadata API” is used by “Package builder” to build a package.xml file based on components in your Salesforce org. Handy for building a package.xml file for use with ANT Force.com Migration or other IDE tools, or building a destructiveChanges.xml file. This is useful for people who want to list all components and then chop and change the XML for use with source control or IDEs. This fits a gap with IDEs that tend to auto-wildcard selections when trying to extract all components from an Org.

Faster than having to download all the actual metadata to build your package.xml file.

Step: 1 

  • From Salesforce Tool Kit page, click on “Package Builder” link

Step: 2 

  • Select the Environment as “Production or Sandbox”.
  • Click on “Login to Salesforce with oauth” button and enter your “Username and Password” and click on login button.

Step: 3 

  1. Select the “Component option” as “All components/Exclude Managed/No Packaged Components” if we want and click on “Get Components” button
  2. If select All component – It will get all components in your Org.
  3. If select Exclude Managed – It will exclude managed components in your Org.
  4. If select No Packaged Components – It will omit all packaged components in your Org.
salesforce toolkit

Step: 4 

  • Finally, will get the build a package.xml file based on components in your Salesforce org

Conclusion:

There are certain actions in Salesforce which require the user to click on multiple pages to complete the simple task–exporting Metadata could be the tedious job. Salesforce tool kit enables us to work efficiently and effectively in your salesforce Org to complete most of the tiresome jobs in much simpler way. It allows us to insert, update, compare components and data between two orgs. This tool acts as a one-stop-shop for the development team while involving in the development activities.

Reference: 

Salesforce Toolkit

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