In Summer ’13, approval processes are available in change sets and are exposed in the Metadata API. This means that you can move approval processes from a sandbox organization to your production organization!
We understand how time-consuming it can be to create and test an approval process in sandbox, and how frustrating and error-prone it can be to recreate (and retest!) the approval process in a production organization. You asked for approvals in change sets to ease your deployments, and we’re delivering!
There are, however, a few restrictions to keep in mind when moving approval processes via change sets:
- If the approval page fields include any custom fields on standard objects, you need to manually add those custom fields to outbound change sets. The “View/Add Dependencies” option for selecting change set components won’t include these fields.
- Post templates for Approvals in Chatter can’t be uploaded to another organization via change sets. Either remove references to post templates from the approval process before upload, or recreate the post templates in the destination organization before deploying the approval process.
- If you change the Unique Name (fullName) of an approval process that was previously included in a change set and deployed in another organization, and you resend the approval process via a change set, a new approval process will be created upon deployment in the other organization. The previously deployed approval process will not be modified.
If you’re new to change sets, check out the following resources: