The process of trying to edit my org’s “metadata” with VSCode instead of Eclipse was not nearly as bad as I thought it’d be.įor well over a year, having heard bits and pieces of information about “DX,” I thought I was going to have to change everything about the way I pushed code to Salesforce, having been an Eclipse and “ IDE” user for years. Need extra help on XML? Download Intro to XML, JSON, & YAML – the book Nevertheless, the principle that you can make certain changes to your Salesforce org faster with code than you can with clicks may remain true with other pieces of your org’s structure, so I’ll leave the tutorial up even after “copy-paste” comes back in the web-based flow builder. I hear that copy-paste functionality will be back into the Salesforce Flow web editor as of summer ‘19, so this post’s example code will soon be a bit “dated.” Think of it like using the “Data Loader,” but for your org’s structure instead of its data. Here’re the instructions I sent her for Windows.ĭevelopers, you can skim the deep dive into downloading, editing, and re-uploading a flow’s XML, since you probably already know exactly which files you’re trying to edit.Īdministrators, the idea behind this post is that sometimes, it’s faster or easier to change the structure of your Salesforce org by downloading files representing that structure to your local computer, editing them, and re-uploading them to Salesforce. That part is easy, but I needed to walk her through setting up her computer to talk to Salesforce about an org’s configuration “metadata.” Keep the files on your computer up-to-date over timeĪ colleague wanted to edit the XML behind Salesforce flows so she could quickly copy/paste entire flows, copy/paste variables within a flow, etc.Edit and re-upload a configuration file.Specify what files to request from Salesforce.