Cannot modify metadata subscription

[Jason Clark]

I just updated from the last 2023.x version of WebStorm to 2024.1.1 this morning, so possibly that is relevant.

I needed to pull in a metadata file that’s not currently in my subscription (a Platform Cache Partition). I followed these steps:

1. Tools > Illuminated Cloud > Retrieve Metadata…
2. Set “Contents” to “Custom”
3. Confirmed the MD type I need (PlatformCachePartition) isn’t available, so tried to edit my subscription by clicking the Pencil icon button next to the “Contents” picklist.
4. Tried to check a box to add MD to the subscription. ALL rows (for all metadata types) in the Subscription list are read-only. See Screenshot.
5. Closed all dialogs and tried again via Tools > Illuminated Cloud > Configure Module… and observed the same behavior; all rows are read-only.

So at this point I can’t figure out how to change my MD subscription for this project. After poking around in several projects, I’ve found the following:

• I cannot edit the MD subscription in any project that uses scratch orgs. One of them (the one in my example) doesn’t have a manifest/package.xml but another does (I don’t recall why); in both cases, the subscription edit screen only shows the ‘local files’ radio button, and doesn’t show the ‘Package.xml’ option (see screenshot above).
• I CAN edit the MD subscription in projects that use a sandbox org. These all seem to have a manifest/package.xml file, and the subscription edit screen shows that option.

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Finally - not sure it is relevant, but: the first time I encountered this problem, when I tried to do step 5 above, I couldn’t, because “Configure Module…” was missing from the Illuminated Cloud menu, along with about half of the other options. But only for this one project; other projects were fine. I restarted WebStorm and now it all seems fine with the menus. I failed to get a screen shot of the menu before the restart, but I’ve tried to estimate which entries were missing in the screenshot below; I think everything in the red box was missing. This was immediately after updating WebStorm (IC2 had been updated to latest earlier).

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[Scott Wells]

Jason, your module seems to be configured against a scratch org, and presumably a scratch org that's not enabled for deploy/retrieve/delete instead of push/pull. That means that the module is automatically using a read-only Local Files subscription where synchronization between the local project metadata files and the org metadata is handled by source tracking and not explicit metadata subscription management.

Did you perhaps update from an older IC2 build as well that still supported the Selected metadata subscription type. That was removed in 2.2.9.2 and was replaced by the Local Files metadata subscription type that was introduced in 2.2.8.9? If so that might explain some of the confusion.

If you'd like to manage your metadata subscription explicitly, you can do so by enabling Use deploy/retrieve/delete instead of push/pull for that connection.

Please let me know if that doesn't help.

[Jason Clark]

Thanks Scott, that makes sense. I’m sure I was using the older version of IC2, this is a long-standing project and I update IC2 frequently. I suspect I only ran into this because I had to create a special-case branch for one client and needed some extra MD that isn’t in the main branch; it didn’t even occur to me to just pull.

One question: Does the “Use deploy/retrieve/delete instead of push/pull” option exist and default to false for all Scratch Orgs?

[Scott Wells]

Yes, that’s correct. You can find more information in this user guide topic:

https://bitbucket.org/RoseSilverSoftware/illuminatedcloud/wiki/User_Guide/Configuring_Connections

but the short version that, by default, scratch orgs are assumed to use source-tracking. That option must be enabled for a scratch org to use IC2’s more fine-grained/explicit metadata management capabilities.

[Scott Wells]

I'm going to resolve this assuming you're good, but certainly feel free to let me know if not.