Generating package.xml for deploying with Ant from Eclipse

Question

I'm using Ant to deploy from within Eclipse and facing a challenge of having to manually manage my package.xml files.

Currently I am unhappy that I a) have to manually manage my package.xml entries and b) can only deploy all objects in my project.

So these are separate but possibly related problems:

1. Can eclipse or the force.com plugin automatically generate the package.xml file for me? In some of my projects it is there and contains objects, in others it is empty. A refresh from server does not change it. I would expect it to at least contain all subscribed objects.

2. The sf:deploy target complains if there are files in the folder which are not in package.xml If I want to deploy only selected objects I have to manually generate a package.xml and make a new folder with only those classes.

3. Is there a way in ant to have targets use a different package.xml?

[target name="deployAll"] [sf:deploy username="${sf.username}" package="package.xml"/] [/target]

[target name="deployBasic"] [sf:deploy username="${sf.username}" package="package.basic.xml"/] [/target]

If anyone else is also using Ant I would appreciate some tips.

Answer 1

I am using ant together with Jenkins and indeed you need to generate the package.xml yourself or use that one from the eclipse project.

I found this salesforce migration guide very usefull to see what you can add in the ant script to retrieve/deploy

http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/daas/salesforce_migration_guide.pdf

Answer 2

OK, the answer to my 2nd question is to use autoUpdatePackage="true". From the documentation p22:

autoUpdatePackage: Optional. Defaults to false. Specifies whether a deploy should continue even if files present in the zip file are not specified in package.xml. Do not use this parameter for deployment to production organizations.

Also, you can have a package.xml which specifies more files than you actually have in your deployRoot or zipFile if you use allowMissingFiles="true". Again the docu:

allowMissingFiles: Optional. Defaults to false. Specifies whether a deploy succeeds even if files that are specified in package.xml are not in the zip file. Do not use this parameter for deployment to production organizations.

The answer too question 3 seems to be No! See p23:

You can deploy any set of components as a package or into your organization directly in the unpackaged package. The package used is not determined by the build.xml target, but by the project manifest (package.xml).

Answer 3

You can create a simple shell or batch script that generates the package XML file based on the files contained in the folder to deploy. I have set up something like that for running my test classes individually rather than running all tests.

In regards to your second question, I haven't tried changing the name but I am quite positive it should work, at least it should take different package.xml files in different directories.