Ok thanks, metadata nuances which we all know exist

Hi Junette,

we've discovered a couple of scenarios that will cause this to happen, and unfortunately they are beyond are control. We get these dates directly from salesforce for each object. Unfortunately, they are sometimes incorrectly reported.

3 examples for this:

1. I think a common case where this happens is where salesforce has made some change, e.g. in the case of a new release (winter 17 being an obvious recent example).

2. Sometimes it's also not obvious that a change belongs to one user over another. For example, if you made a change to custom field A in a custom object, and then your team mate made a change to custom field B in the same custom object, then I suspect we would report the changed by date of both fields as your team mate. This would be because salesforce gives us the changed date for the custom object and not the field itself. (That's just an example by the way, I can't remember if that's precisely true for custom objects/custom fields off the top of my head).

3. And this seems to be one of the most common (I believe Mike's issue is caused by this):
There are certain situations where retrieving the metadata can cause the changed by dates to update to now and the user doing the retrieval.

We're only reporting back the info that Salesforce give us I'm afraid.

I ran into this as well. In my monitoring log, it listed changes made by a user under "Changed By", but when checking the Setup Audit Trail in Salesforce, they had not made any changes to the org.

It's reporting me both sides - it seems to be showing me and the date time of the comparison

Oh I believe you as that data comes from Salesforce and isn't always 100%.

Is it 'correct' for either side of the comparison? I.e. Is the listed user somebody that changed it in either source or target?

I have a strange shot if you require proof