How can I get a list of the current changeset names?

Question

It is possible using the details from Salesforce Metadata Api/ Tooling Api to build changesets to retrieve and modify the contents of a change set via the Metadata API.

However, the whole process depends on knowing the "Change Set Name" that can then be used as the Package Name against the Metadata API.

Is there a programmatic way to discover the package names of the changesets that exist in an org?

Ideally this would be an official API.

See also, Salesforce Idea: Expose the native change sets via an API

Answer 1

To get a list of outbound change sets using the Salesforce CLI some set up would be required. A file that contains the following:

changeset.apex

PageReference pr=new PageReference('/changemgmt/listOutboundChangeSet.apexp');
Blob output=pr.getContent();
System.debug('### Content = \n' + output.toString());

Then the command sfdx force:apex:execute -f changeset.apex --json -u <username>

This would return the change set page as part of a json response.

It is possible to parse the HTML from the response, I've used cheerio for this, and then loop through the rows of the change set table searching for the ids.

A full working example as a self contained plugin for SFDX is available at https://github.com/BrettMN/sfdx-wipd-plugin

With the plugin it is possible to get the json output with providing only a username but it does not currently return the id of the change set

To see where the response is handle Line 44 of commands/changeset_list.js is where it begins.

Answer 2

The following apex code should parse the change set setup page and put the change set names into a list:

PageReference pr = new PageReference('/changemgmt/listOutboundChangeSet.apexp');
String output = pr.getContent().toString();
List<String> entitiesToParse = output.split('"Clone - ');
List<String> changeSetNames = new List<String>();

for (String entity : entitiesToParse) {
String changeSetName = entity.SubStringBefore('"');
    changeSetNames.add(changeSetName);
}

System.debug(changeSetNames);

I have a use case for this that uploads the change sets as a metadata zip to a Github repo. It involves using the above code to grab the list of outbound change sets, commit the list as a comma delimitted string to a file on Github (via HTTP callout to Github from Apex). Then I have github actions that notice the commit and uses SFDX commands to retrieve the change sets like so:

sfdx force:mdapi:retrieve -r ./backup-changeset-manifests/Partial-Sandbox/in-flight-backups -p "$CHANGESETS_TO_RETRIEVE" -u $USERNAME

Answer 3

Poll EventLogFile every hour, extract any change sets

    def getChangeSetStatus(self):

        hourlyTimestamp = datetime.fromtimestamp(datetime.utcnow().timestamp() - (3600 * 1))
        dtFormat = '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S-00:00%z'
        query = f"SELECT EventType, LogDate, LogFileFieldNames, LogFile, Interval FROM EventLogFile WHERE EventType='ChangeSetOperation' AND Interval='Hourly' AND LogDate >= {hourlyTimestamp.strftime(dtFormat)}"
        print(query)
        url = f"{self._auth['instanceUrl']}/services/data/v{apiVersion}/query/?q={quote_plus(query)}"
        eventTypeLogResult = self._client.request('GET', url).json()

        for result in eventTypeLogResult['records']:
          
            url = f"{self._auth['instanceUrl']}{result['LogFile']}"
            logfileResult = self._client.request('GET', url).text
            df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(logfileResult), usecols=['CHANGE_SET_NAME'])

            for i, row in df.iterrows():
                sfdxCmd = f"sfdx force:source:retrieve -n '{row['CHANGE_SET_NAME']}' --targetusername={self.targetusername} --json"
                try:
                    p = subprocess.Popen(sfdxCmd, shell=True,
                                stdout=subprocess.PIPE, encoding='utf-8')
                    result = p.communicate()[0].strip()
                    p.stdout.close()
                except:
                    raise PopenError(f"Error with cmd: {sfdxCmd}. Error Msg: {sys.exc_info()[0]}")

                findCmd = f"find '{row['CHANGE_SET_NAME']}' -name '*' -type f -print | awk -F/ '{{ print $(NF-1) \" - \" $NF }}'"
                try:
                    p = subprocess.Popen(findCmd, shell=True,
                                stdout=subprocess.PIPE, encoding='utf-8')
                    result = p.communicate()[0].strip()
                    p.stdout.close()
                except:
                    raise PopenError(f"Error with cmd: {findCmd}. Error Msg: {sys.exc_info()[0]}")

                print(result)