Metadata retrieve

[nullglitch]

What are the "options" when using the "retrieve" function in the metadata SfdcMetadataApi?

[nickmellor]

Hey nullglitch,

This isn't documented as far as I can see, so I went to the source code and to the metadata API to find out more. It took a fair amount of effort.

'options' is a list of unpackaged metadata types to retrieve, and the members of that type you want to retrieve.

In my case I used the following code. The asterisks mean retrieve all members for this metatype.

metatypes = ['AccountSettings', 'ActionLinkGroupTemplate', 'ActionOverride']
retrieve_options = dict(single_package=False)
# include all members of each type, in order
unpackaged_types = OrderedDict()
for metatype in metatypes:
    unpackaged_types[metatype] = '*'
retrieve_options['single_package'] = False
retrieve_options['unpackaged'] = unpackaged_types
return retrieve_options

If you try to retrieve all metatypes at once you may hit Python's memory limit, as sfdclib tries to build the zip in memory. Depends how big your Salesforce solution is.

There are one or two metatypes that cause errors. I'm raising a separate ticket for those.

Cheers,

Nick

[adam133]

Adding to @nickmellor's comment, this page has the full list. https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_meta.meta/api_meta/metadata.htm