Specifying Named Components

The Ant Migration Tool is retired with Spring ’24. The tool continues to function as-is for future API versions but isn’t updated with new functionality and isn’t supported. If Salesforce adds a new feature that is incompatible with Ant, the Ant Migration Tool won’t be updated to support it. To manage metadata changes, switch to Salesforce CLI for a modern, supported developer experience.

Note

To retrieve a component, specify the type of component in the <name> element and declare each component to be retrieved or deployed in the <members> element. The following is a sample package.xml project manifest that names two custom objects to be retrieved or deployed:

1<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
2<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
3    <types>
4        <members>MyCustomObject__c</members>
5        <members>MyHelloWorldObject__c</members>
6        <name>CustomObject</name>
7    </types>
8    <version>68.0</version>
9</Package>

Some metadata components are sub-components of another component. This means you must dot-qualify the sub-component with the parent component name.

The following metadata components are defined as part of an object:

CustomField
Picklist
RecordType
Weblink
ValidationRule

For example, the following code retrieves a validation rule called ValidationRuleName on the Opportunity object:

1<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
2<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
3    <types>
4        <members>Opportunity.ValidationRuleName</members>
5        <name>ValidationRule</name>
6    </types>
7    <version>68.0</version>
8</Package>