Unable to Retrieve Standard Tabs Visibility into Profiles

[Petr Svestka]

Hi Scott,

We're unable to retrieve Tab visibility for standard Tabs for which there's no sObject, e..g, Home, People, Reports, etc., along with the others.

The SFDC-correct way is to use a package.xml like this:

...
    <types>
        <members>*</members>
        <members>standard-OtherUserProfile</members>
        <members>standard-home</members>
        <members>standard-report</members>
        <name>CustomTab</name>
    </types>
    <types>
        <members>*</members>
        <name>Profile</name>
    </types>
...

While this is correctly processed by an ANT job (with some warnings about it), IC silently fails to retrive the Tab visibility info. It's completely ignored.

Can you have a look quickly and fix it pls?

Thank you.

Kind regards, Petr

[Scott Wells]

Petr, when you retrieve via IC, are you just retrieving the profiles or have you also selected the custom tabs? When you retrieve profiles and permission sets you must retrieve the things they authorize because otherwise they're sparsely-populated.

[Petr Svestka]

Hi Scott, thanks for a quick reply!

You can use the above snippet as an example of what I'm trying to retrieve via IC (tried module & deps, and context). API 41.0.

Note there's no sObject behind the "standard-report" Tab, it's just a specific standard Tab in Salesforce, however, you can change it's visibility as usual. And I'm unable to capture such a change via IC.

Profiles do get retrieved, however, without the respective parts for those standard Tabs.

[Scott Wells]

Ah, okay, and sorry I didn't correlate what you'd added in the description more closely. Unfortunately because of the quirky nature of profile/permission set retrieval, I almost auto-respond to questions that look like they fall into that category.

I see what you're saying, though...these are metadata entries that aren't included in the API listMetadata('CustomTab') response but are still valid to retrieve and deploy. I've had to implement a similar workaround for StandardValueSet. I'll take a look at doing the same for these.

[Scott Wells]

Petr, I'm doing a little quick searching for the authoritative list of these special tab names. The closest thing I've found in Salesforce's docs is under:

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_meta.meta/api_meta/meta_customapplication.htm

and it seems far from authoritative. Cobbling together what I have found, it looks like the following should be available, though:

standard-home
standard-Chatter
standard-UserProfile
standard-OtherUserProfile
standard-CollaborationGroup
standard-File
standard-report

Do you have a good link to documentation on this, or can you comment on the list above? Thanks!

[Petr Svestka]

No authoritative list I know of, but I used REST API for /services/data/v41.0/tabs to arrive at a list of all Tab in my Spring '18 Sandbox. Of course, the Tabs will depend on the features enabled in the org. Maybe you can allow anything that starts with "standard-".

Here's what it gives me (plus a few custom sObject Tabs and custom web Tabs specific to my org):

standard-Account
standard-Asset
standard-Campaign
standard-Case
standard-Chatter
standard-CollaborationGroup
standard-Console
standard-Contact
standard-Contract
standard-Dashboard
standard-Document
standard-DuplicateRecordSet
standard-File
standard-Forecasting3
standard-Idea
standard-Lead
standard-Macro
standard-Opportunity
standard-Order
standard-OtherUserProfile
standard-Pricebook2
standard-Product2
standard-ProfilePlatformFeed
standard-ProfilePlatformOverview
standard-ProfileSkill
standard-Quote
standard-Recognition
standard-Solution
standard-StreamingChannel
standard-UserProfile
standard-WorkBadge
standard-WorkBadgeDefinition
standard-home
standard-report

[Scott Wells]

Okay...I won't be able to turn around a super quick (as in tonight) fix for this. I just returned from a business trip and owe my wife and kids some time this evening! I'll send an email to some of my Salesforce contacts about any authoritative list. I try to offer metadata for selection/inclusion that's valid...otherwise VERY strange things can happen. That's particularly important for users who don't use a package.xml-based metadata subscription Let me see what they say and that will help me determine how best to proceed on this.

[Petr Svestka]

No prob Scott :-)

Found out two things:

1 those standard Tabs that can be modified in a way, and are modified, and are retrieved, create a file under tabs in addition to adding its visibility to the profile file
2 unmodified Tabs don't make up a separate file under tabs and so deployment fails with 'An object 'standard-report' of type CustomTab was named in package.xml, but was not found in zipped directory'

So if you have a source to give us an authoritative list and/or behavior, it'll be the best we can do now.

[Petr Svestka]

Hi Scott,

What is the progress on this one please?

Thank you.

Best, Petr

[Scott Wells]

I haven't heard back from Salesforce yet. I'll follow up on that thread today. Even if I hear back it's not something I'll be able to address this weekend because I'm in the process of updating for Spring '18, but one way or the other I'll see if I can get you a fix (even if it's hard-coded for the time-being) next week.

[Scott Wells]

The fix for this will be included in the next build. I'm just using that same REST resource to list the standard tabs in the org and folding that into the CustomTab metadata. I'm now able to retrieve/deploy the standard tab metadata as well as profiles and permission sets that authorize access to those tabs.

[Scott Wells]

Delivered in 1.8.2.0 and 2.0.1.1.