Bob Buzzard Blog: Documenting from the metadata source with a Salesforce CLI Plug-In

Sunday 26 April 2020

Documenting from the metadata source with a Salesforce CLI Plug-In - Part 4

Introduction

In Part 1 of this series, I explained how to generate a plugin and clone the example command.
In Part 2 I covered finding and loading the package.json manifest and my custom configuration file.
In Part 3, I explained how to load and process source format metadata files.

In this episode I'll show how to enrich the field information by pulling in information from elsewhere in the metadata - specifically global or standard value sets. When I'm using a global value set for picklist values, all I have in my field XML metadata is a reference to the set:

<valueset>
    <restricted>true</restricted>
    <valuesetname>Genre</valuesetname>
</valueset>

and the actual values live in the (in this case) Genre.globalValueSet-meta.xml file in the globalValueSets folder.

When I create the HTML report for the object metadata, I want to pull these values in, otherwise whoever is viewing the report has to go into the Salesforce org to figure out just which Genres are available.

Figuring the Value Set Type

Fields using standard value sets don't actually specify the value set name, instead it has to be derived from the field using the information in the metadata API documentation. I try to find a standard value set matching the field and if none exists then I fall back to loading the named global value set. The actual loading is the same, and should be familiar to anyone who read part 2 - I use fast-xml-parser to load the XML and parse - however, as multiple fields can refer to the same value set, I cache the parsed metadata :

let getGlobalValueSet = (dir, name) => {
    let valueSet=globalValueSetByName[name];
    if (null==valueSet) {
        globalValueSetByName[name] = valueSet = 
             parseXMLToJS(join(dir, 'globalValueSets', name + 
                                    '.globalValueSet-meta.xml'));
    }

    return valueSet;
}

I then assign this to a new property on the field named gvs. As I'm processing the metadata in an offline mode, if I can't find the global value set, the property will be null.

Adding the Information to the Field

When processing the field, I expand the values from the value set by iterating them and extracting the names - note that if the gvs property is not populated then I output a message that it isn't in version control:

var vsName=field.valueSet.valueSetName;
result+='<b>Global Value Set (' + vsName +')</b><br/>';
if (field.gvs) {
   field.gvs.GlobalValueSet.customValue.
      forEach(item => result+='&nbsp;&nbsp;' + item.fullName + '<br/>');
}
else {
   result+='Not version controlled';
}

This is a relatively simple piece of enrichment, just pulling some information from another XML metadata file and inserting that in the row for the field. However, it doesn't have to be metadata that is included - it can be additional information, a diagram, anything that can be written out to HTML - quite powerful once you realise that.

One More Thing

The version of the plugin is now at 2.0.3. From the user perspective nothing should change, but the mechanism for generating the report is completely different, which I'll write more about in the next exciting episode.

One More One More Thing

You can view the output for the example repo of Salesforce metadata on Heroku at : https://bbdoc-example.herokuapp.com/index.html

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