Allow contextual deployment/retrieval of unsubscribed metadata

[Scott Wells]

This was requested via a discussion with Vinodh Amudala:

Regarding your question, I would need to give you some background regarding our platform. We have multiple teams under different IT departments leveraging the platform using multiple lightning apps. These teams are working on different feature sets including different clouds (sales, service, etc.,). So, it is not feasible for me to use the push and pull feature on the org as there is too much metadata and they keep changing very fast.

Each developer in our org has their own sandbox environment where they develop their code, once it is ready for the component testing, they move it to the sprint development environment. Next it moves to the QA environment and finally bundled -> SIT and then to UAT, etc., We use the Git as the primary source and use a SFDX plugin (https://www.npmjs.com/package/sfdx-git-delta) to generate automatic package.xml for deploying only changes between the release branch and master.

As a lead engineer on the team, I have to conduct open office hours where we triage issues that developers are facing, pair programming to fix the issues, commit the changes and move forward. I could easily do that with VS Code since I use the CLI extensions that allows me to right click and deploy (all changes are tracked within Git). There is not a real need for me to use the package.xml to track my metadata as Git already does that for me. I commit the changes, make comments for the commit and push to git remote. Then I switch to another branch or go back to my branch to work on my feature.

Also, during test failures, I have to check what is going on. I find that the tools like log analyzer, ability to view debug information right in the IDE are all awesome with your plugin. But I have to perform additional clicks to subscribe to the fixed files, or try to follow the approach that you had mentioned that requires additional steps. And everytime I switch branches, I have to confirm the package.xml changes as well (adds and removes). I'm the kind of guy who checks if I locked the house a few times. :) And that makes me paranoid if those changes are correct or not whenever something is prompted.

Ultimately what has been requested is that if a deploy/retrieve(/delete?) operation is initated with a contextual selection that includes unsubscribed metadata, the build options dialog should be configured automatically to include the unsubscribed metadata in the operation. This likely means disabling the Subscribed Only checkbox and either changing the Contents drop-down to Custom with an appropriate custom selection or keeping it on Context but checking all contextually-selected metadata whether subscribed or unsubscribed.

It might also make sense to prompt the user to add the unsubscribed metadata to the project’s metadata subscription, though if so, it should be possible to disable that prompt as well.