Template Migration

This feature is available on the following TaskRay Product Edition

  • Premium

Change management is an integral part of any business workflow. It comes in many forms and it impacts every area of an organization. As such, it is important to have the tools that can support and and make the change management process a breeze. 

With that, let's briefly talk about TaskRay templates and how they relate to change management. Templates allow mapping out repeatable business processes. Then, the templates are used to create new projects in TaskRay on an ongoing basis. As time goes on, it is inevitable for those processes to change, which means that it becomes necessary to update templates.

In Salesforce, it is generally a best practice to first make and test changes in sandbox orgs to avoid impacting live data. This applies to TaskRay templates as well, especially when they are used in automations or are tied to various other processes in the org. Considering that templates are essentially records in Salesforce, the process of testing them in sandboxes and then pushing the changes to production can be a very manual and detailed process. 

The good news is that the premium edition of TaskRay includes a feature that will take care of all that manual work on your behalf. The Template Migration feature is designed to allow migrating templates across environments, such as from sandbox to production, just with a few clicks. How cool is that?

 

About Data Migration & Considerations

Before we go over the steps on how to use the Template Migration feature, let's review a few related considerations.

Benefits of the Template Migration Feature

A lot can go into making changes to a template. Not only is it the changes to the template data itself, it is also things like testing and making sure that other related processes are working as expected. Generally, it is best to do all testing in a sandbox to ensure that live data isn't impacted.

When it comes to org configurations and settings, Salesforce offers the functionality of Change Sets to transfer configurations between sandbox and production environments. With that said, Change Sets only allow transferring metadata (e.g. configurations done through the Setup menu), but they cannot be used for transferring record data. Considering that TaskRay templates are a collection of records (a.k.a. data), change sets cannot be used to move them across environments.

As such, without the Template Migration feature, the only way to transfer templates across environments is by way of data migration tools, such as data loader. This can be a tedious process that incorporates many steps. For example, when it comes to manually transferring template data, the different components of the template have to be imported in a specific order, there is a lot of mappings that need to be manually associated in the destination environment, and there is a lot of room for potential error.

With the Template Migration feature, all those worries can be a thing of the past. All you'd have to do to move templates across environments is click a few buttons and TaskRay will take care of the rest!

Template Migration allows you to build templates in your sandbox environment, thoroughly test everything that you need, and then simply transfer them to your production without worrying that something might not go as planned. Additionally, this feature allows preserving template Addressable IDs across environments. This means that if there are any automations that use templates to create projects (i.e. cloning or stitching), those can remain untouched when you import a new template version from another environment.

 

Considerations

The following considerations are important to note for the Template Migration feature:

  • Template migration requires one of the following: TaskRay - Template Manager Access permission set, the TaskRay - Admin Access permission set, or the TaskRay Template Migration custom permission.
  • Template hierarchies (e.g. template sub-projects) and Files are not supported with this feature. 
  • When migrating templates, TaskRay will attempt to match the imported template to another existing template in the org using the Addressable ID values. If a match is found, then you will have the option to either import the template as a new version or as an entirely new template. In the event that a match was not found, then the template will be imported as a net new template.

 

Migrating a Template

Now that we've covered the background information, let's dive into the process of migrating a template. Below we'll walk through an example of migrating a template from a sandbox to a production org. However, please note that templates can be migrated to and from any environment. 

 

Export

To begin, login to the source org where the template changes were made. For this example, our source org is our sandbox environment.

  1. Navigate to Template Hub
  2. Click Export  
  3. Select the Template and Template Version you wish to exportexport-selections.png
  4. Click Export. This will download a JSON file for the selected template. 
    Note: Direct modifications to the JSON file are not supported; do not edit the file after export.

 

Import

Now that you have exported file with the template data from your source org, login into the destination org you'd like to import the template into. For this example, we will login to the production org. 

  1. Navigate to Template Hub
  2. Click Import
  3. Upload the JSON file you exported by drag and dropping the file into the modal, or clicking Browse Files and selecting the file.
  4. Choose how to import the templateimport-match
    • Add to Matching Template - This will create the next version of the matching template 
      Note! This option is only available when TaskRay finds a matching template in the org. 
    • Create New Template - This will create a brand new template
  5. Update the Name and Version Notes, if applicable
  6. Click Import

That's it!

You've successfully migrated a template from sandbox to production. Now start using the feature to migrate templates to and from any environment.

Was this article helpful?

2 out of 3 found this helpful

Have more questions? Submit a request