Salesforce DX Developer Guide

How Salesforce Developer Experience (DX) Tooling Changes the Way You Work
Provide Developers Access to Salesforce DX Tools
Project Setup
Authorization
Metadata Coverage
Scratch Orgs
Sandboxes
Track Changes Between Your Project and Org
Manage Source Tracking for Your org
Preview Changes Identified by Source Tracking
Deploy and Retrieve Changes Identified by Source Tracking
Retrieve Changes to Profiles with Source Tracking
Resolve Conflicts Between Your Local Project and Org
Best Practices
Performance Considerations of Source Tracking
Work with Data
Development
Build and Release Your App
Unlocked Packages
Continuous Integration
Troubleshoot Salesforce DX
Limitations for Salesforce DX
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Retrieve Changes to Profiles with Source Tracking

Retrieving profiles behaves a little differently with source tracking.

In general, we recommend that you use permission sets instead of profiles. Profiles aren’t consistent across orgs, and the source files that are retrieved and deployed depend on the org type, the tracking state, and other metadata in the operation. If you decide to continue using profiles, we recommend that you exclude them when you deploy or retrieve by adding them to the .forceignore file.

Important

Without source tracking, retrieving profiles only returns some profile information. Retrieving profiles returns information about profiles that pertains to other items specified in the package.xml file.

For example, retrieving profiles with this package.xml file returns profile permissions for the MyCustomField__c custom field on the Account object.

With source tracking, retrieving profiles returns profile information pertaining to anything else specified in the package.xml file plus any components getting tracked by source tracking. That includes any entity for which a change exists between your local project and the org.

For example, say you create a custom field on the Opportunity object called OppCustomField__c in your local environment. Source tracking detects the change and reports it. Now you retrieve profiles using the same package.xml file as you did when source tracking was off.

Even though the package.xml file doesn’t reference OppCustomField__c, because source tracking is tracking the new custom field, your retrieve returns profile permissions for both the MyCustomField__c custom field on the Account object and the OppCustomField__c on the Opportunity object.

For more information about retrieving profiles, see the Profile metadata type in the Metadata API Developer Guide.

Although source retrieves don’t include package.xml files, retrieve requests return profile information pertaining to everything reported by source tracking.

Note