How to connect to Salesforce Metadata

One of our stakeholders moved to a different team and no longer wished to receive any kinds of salesforce notifications or emails with respect to his previous role. This means removing stakeholders email from salesforce wherever it is being used. If you are working in a huge organization and you do not know where one's email is currently being used then you need to be ready with your diving suite and fins to take a deep dive in the salesforce and search every workflow rule, case escalation rule, tasks, triggers, lead assignment rules, notifications, apex class, assignment rules etc. not sure what the ETA could be …lol

Let’s take another example, business has come to you with a list of fields that they wish to delete from a page layout, how would you know if it is safe to delete this field? There is a huge possibility that this field is also being used somewhere else right? Are you going to find out by trial and error method by deleting the field in Dev environment? Of course you can try deleting this field and wait to see the error error…bang!!... This field is being used in xyz workflow rule, but what if the field is being used in 5 rules it won’t alert you until you don’t remove it from the first workflow rule then it will prompt the second area where it is being used right? Is there any other way?

There could be more than one way to address this problem but I found the answer by using “MavensMate”. This application does wonders in minutes, quickly connects to your  sandbox, developer org or production environment and provides access to the metadata. Analyze data, build stuff and deploy components using maven-mate. 

What is MavensMate?

Mavensmate is a powerful open source tool to build force.com applications, it extends the functionality found in the Eclipse force.com IDE 

Why is MavensMate Admin’s buddy?

• Move your metadata using Mavens mate
• Very easy to install
• Deploy stuffs that you cannot deploy using change sets
• Access your org's metadata 
• Deploy components between environments
• Multi-tasking during deployments- while your components are getting deployed you can work on other components.
• Deploy components individually
• User friendly debug logs
• Deployment steps are less painful
• Data fetch from the server is quick
• You can customize your data selection under project metadata
• Deployment success or failure report is user friendly 

How to search an email/field in Salesforce Metadata using MavensMate

Step1: Create a new project in MavensMate

Step2: Specify project details 

Step3: Go to "Advanced" tab and select metadata subscription list. Depending on the size of organization mavens mate will take time to connect to your metadata. While searching a field or an email I usually prefer selecting subscription list in groups, this truly depends on the choice of an admin. 

Step4: Click on update subscription 

Step4: Go to Project Metadata tab, select the components and click on update project.

Once you update the project go to sublime text--> files--> open file--> open the package that you just now created. 

Step5: Go to find tab and click on find in files-

Step6: On the bottom side of the screen you will see "Find" "Where" and "Replace" options. Type the name of the field or an email on the Find option and click next. Mavensmate will display all the related matches in the package. 

Finding any data in salesforce metadata using Mavenmate is so quick and easy.