Provide ordering for metadata elements when committing to version control
When metadata is retrieved from Salesforce the order of child nodes is not guaranteed and results in false-positive changes when committing to version control. Usually this will be something simple like workflow actions/criteria appearing out-of-order which can be compared manually. However, recently we've noticed entire profiles being committed with every permissions element out-of-order, resulting in a change set with ~20k lines where the actual change is impossible to visualize.
Gearset should provide a feature to 'order' child XML elements alphabetically by name in order to provide consistent commits to version control and eliminate false-positives.
Eric Munson
shared this idea
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Pedro Freire
commented
Even if the files aren't actually sorted, the diff should be smart not to introduce false positives. There are already several diff tools and other solutions in the market doing it, so it's hard to understand why Gearset, being a specialized toolset sticks to the basics instead of looking to add greater value.
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Kris Goncalves
commented
It'd be nice to also just hear back if this is feasible as it would be nice to be able to trust the diff to make sure we know what is actually changing when deploying layouts/profiles.
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Matt
commented
Agree!
Even the simplest of change control scenarios (e.g. like those outlined in Gearset post https://docs.gearset.com/en/articles/2934192-a-sample-source-driven-development-workflow) seem to result in pull requests with thousands of false positive changes for the out-of-order permission nodes.
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Emmanuel
commented
To provide more consistency we built an XSLT file to reorder profiles alphabetically. We could share the file with you if gearset want to use it as a pre commit hook to ensure that profiles are always sorted the same way.
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Simon
commented
I agree! Profiles and objects can be difficult to work with during merges