Getting Information About Metadata Types

You sometimes need to experiment with the composition of your package.xml manifest file before you settle on the final version that retrieves or deploys the metadata that you want. There are a couple of helper targets, <sf:describeMetadata> and <sf:listMetadata>, that are useful for gathering the relevant information during this experimentation period. The build.xml file specifies a series of commands to be executed by Ant. Within the build.xml file are named targets that process a series of commands when you run Ant with a target name.