Sandbox Change Sets

1. Sandbox Change Sets

1.1 Definition of Sandbox Change Sets

A change set is a packaged collection of metadata. Change sets are used to send metadata from one environment to another associated environment for deployment.

What is metadata?

• Metadata refers to configuration items in the administrative menus of the organization, such as objects, fields, page layouts, permissions, flows, and custom functions.
• Metadata does not include business (transactional) data.

1.2 When to Use Sandbox Change Sets

During follow-up implementations, to avoid impacting production operations, create a sandbox environment and perform configuration and testing there.

After configuring and validating new changes in the sandbox, you must migrate those new configurations to production.

To do this, create a change set in the sandbox, add the metadata components you want to sync to production, send the change set from the sandbox to production, then validate and deploy the change set in production. This completes the metadata migration from sandbox to production.

1.3 Types of Sandbox Change Sets

• Outbound Change Set: An outbound change set is a collection of metadata sent from the current environment to an external associated environment.
• Inbound Change Set: An inbound change set is a collection of metadata that has been sent from an external associated environment to the current environment. After receiving an inbound change set, the organization can validate and deploy it.

1.4 Notes and Caveats for Using Sandbox Change Sets

• Deploying a change set creates new metadata or updates existing metadata in the target environment. The primary key used to determine whether to create or update is typically the metadata’s API name.
• You cannot delete metadata via change sets; change sets can only create or update metadata.
• Once a change set is successfully deployed, it cannot be rolled back with a single action. To remove metadata deployed by a change set, manually delete each deployed metadata item through the administrative interface.