Managing Projects with Sandboxes and Change Sets

One of the key things when it comes to effectively managing projects on the Salesforce platform is understanding sandboxes. A sandbox is a copy of your organization in a separate environment that you can use for a variety of purposes, such as testing and training. It also helps to understand how the right environment management strategy can help you ensure your code and configuration have been built and tested with quality before being deployed to your production environment. These changes are then deployed from a sandbox to your production environment using change sets.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Creating and using sandboxes
• Using different types of sandboxes
• Creating change sets
• Deploying change sets

With the help of these topics, you will be able to understand how to create sandboxes, as well as knowing which type of sandbox to create. You will also learn how to build...

Technical requirements

For this chapter, all you need to do is follow along with the screenshots provided—development environments do not contain sandboxes, so you will not be able to create a practice sandbox in your development environment.

Creating and using sandboxes

When working day to day as an admin, it is important that you do not make changes that can disrupt your active users. For this reason, we create and test new features in sandboxes. Sandboxes are environments that are isolated from your production Salesforce environment. This means you can make and test changes and they will have no impact whatsoever on your live users. In this section, we will introduce a business use case and learn how to create a sandbox.

Business use case

You are the Salesforce admin at XYZ Widgets. You have some configuration and automation ideas that you would like to build and test, but you don’t want to cause any interruptions in the live production organization. You decide to create a sandbox to complete and test your work. Once the work has been completed and tested, you will push it to production using change sets. Let’s see how all of this works.

Creating a sandbox

When you create a sandbox, all...

Using different types of sandboxes

There are four types of sandboxes:

• Developer
• Developer Pro
• Partial Copy
• Full Copy

Each type of sandbox has different features and possible uses within the business. Their main differences have to do with how long an interval they have between refreshing, as well as capacity differences and different sandbox features. Let’s take a look at these types and the differences between them in the following sections.

Developer sandboxes

Developer sandboxes are the most common types of sandboxes. There is no extra fee for this sandbox and it can be refreshed daily. This sandbox has a capacity of 200 MB and includes Configuration, Apex & Metadata, and All Users from the production organization. The most common use case for this sandbox is for coding since you have to build code in a sandbox in order to push it to production. It can also be used to make configuration changes, as well as to test those changes...

Creating change sets

After creating features and testing them in our sandbox, the next step is to move these features from the test environment to the live production environment. This can be done using change sets. Change sets allow you to move your metadata and configuration changes from the source environment to a target environment. In this section, we will introduce a business use case and learn how to create a change set.

Note: DevOps Center will eventually replace change sets. See the Further reading section at the end of this chapter for more information regarding DevOps Center.

Business use case

In the preceding use case, we created a sandbox called config. After you’ve made your configuration and automation changes for this sandbox and tested them, you will want to move those changes over to the live production environment. Let’s see how this works with change sets.

Creating change sets

Let’s take a look at how to create...

Deploying change sets

Before you can deploy a change set, you have to set up a deployment connection between the source organization (sandbox) and the target organization (production), or a connection from one sandbox to another if you have that use case. You can do this by going to the deployment connections in the target organization and allowing inbound change sets.

Under the Deploy tab, click on Deployment Settings in the target organization:

Figure 12.10: Navigating to Deployment Settings from the Home tab

As you can see, some production data has been masked. Let’s take a closer look at this screen:

1. Under Upload Authorization Direction, you can set up the organization so that it receives inbound change sets from the target organization. Once you’ve set this connection up, you’ll be ready to deploy a change set to production.
2. After clicking Upload on the outbound change set in the source organization, it will take up to 30...

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced sandboxes and how to create them. We discussed the four types of sandboxes, their differences, and how each type is used for different purposes. The purpose of any sandbox, ultimately, is to build and configure features without disrupting the production environment. We saw that once we are done building these features in a sandbox, we can use change sets to move their features.

By doing this, we learned how to create change sets, how to upload the change sets to production, and how to deploy the change sets. These skills will help you build and test your configuration and automation features in a safe environment where you cannot disrupt users. After this, you can push those features to users with the confidence that they will work in production.

In the next chapter, we will learn about some of the most common configuration changes we need to make when configuring objects for our businesses.

Questions

1. What are the four types of sandboxes?
2. Which type of sandbox is commonly used for development?
3. Which type of sandbox is commonly used for data migration testing?
4. Why would you add a profile to a change set?
5. Before you upload a change set, what step must you take?
6. Should the outbound change set be set up in the source or the target organization?
7. What is the refresh interval for a Full Copy sandbox?

Further reading

• Sandbox types and templates: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=create_test_instance.htm&type=5
• Sandboxes: Staging environments for customizing and testing: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=deploy_sandboxes_intro.htm&type=5
• Change sets implementation tips: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.changesets_implementation_notes.htm&language=en_US&r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&type=5#:~:text=If%20an%20error%20occurs%20during,undergoing%20maintenance%2C%20or%20otherwise%20inaccessible.&text=A%20change%20set%20is%20deployed%20in%20a%20single%20transaction
• DevOps center: https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2022/06/devops-center-is-now-in-open-beta

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