Force.com Migration Tool & Ant

Question

The context is simple : I need to copy metadata (spec. the Visualforce Page Access from a certain profile)from one org to another with some edition on the fly.

Someone suggested me to use the Force.com Migration Tool, as there are numerous metadata.

I followed the guide provided by Jeff Douglas for the beginning. So far so good, I was able to retrieve/deploy some easy metadata (apex class/visualforce pages).

I'm facing issues when I try to retrieve the metadata on a profile, and specifically on the ProfileApexPageAccess field.

My package.xml looks like this

<types>
    <members>MyProfileName</member>
    <name>Profile.ProfileApexPageAccess</name>
</types>

When I command-lined ant retrieveUnpackaged, I expected different results

<userLicense>MyProfileName</userLicense>
<userPermissions>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
    <name>AllowUniversalSearch</name>
</userPermissions>
<userPermissions>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
    <name>ApiEnabled</name>
</userPermissions>

What am I doing wrong ? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

To fix this, you need to also specify the page that you want to retrieve the permissions for. For example:

<types>
    <members>MyProfileName</member>
    <name>Profile</name>
</types>
<types>
    <members>*</member>
    <name>ApexPage</name>
</types>

This is noted in the documentation:

The content of a profile returned by Metadata API depends on the content requested in the RetrieveRequest message. For example, profiles only include field-level security for fields included in custom objects returned in the same RetrieveRequest as the profiles taken from

This is one of the many, many, many, many things we've had to bake into Gearset as we've built it. Shameless plug but we have a fully featured 30 day trial with zero lock-in and nothing to install in your org that you might want to try out to copy the metadata - should be easier than learning about package.xml intricacies!