afawcett
commented
10 years ago Yes this is a challenge for this Apex Metadata API wrapper for Spring'14 for sure! I hit this in my Spring'14 pre-release org. Once the Salesforce Spring'14 rollout is complete i plan to rollout my solution to this problem formally to this repo. You can read a little about the preview i made of this here.
In the meantime you can see a preview of the MetadataService.cls which supports Layout (and recently WorkflowAlert in response to another question here). Once I roll it out to the repo I have an automated script that adjusts the whole MetadataService.cls and metadata types to support readMetadata. I can update the preview one to support CustomObject in the meantime if you cannot wait, let me know.
gwarburton
There is a new CRUD call in Spring '14 / API 30 named "readMetadata" (http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api_meta/Content/meta_readMetadata.htm).
I expect this is an implementation error but since it's a new call I thought my challenge was worth reporting.
I think in my instance the SFDC parser was failing to recognize the response as the CustomField class extending Metadata.
Error message: Web service callout failed: Unable to parse callout response. Apex type not found for element externalId
Here's the raw soap response up until the point of failure ''' <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <soapenv:Body> <readMetadataResponse> <result> <records xsi:type="CustomField"> <fullName>Case.Custom_Field__c</fullName> <externalId>false</externalId> '''
And the apex classes for the parsing ''' public class readMetadataResponse_element { public SFDC_API_MetaData.ReadResult result; private String[] result_type_info = new String[]{'result','http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata','ReadResult','1','1','false'}; private String[] apex_schema_type_info = new String[]{'http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata','true','false'}; private String[] field_order_type_info = new String[]{'result'}; } public class ReadResult { public SFDC_API_MetaData.Metadata[] records; private String[] records_type_info = new String[]{'records','http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema','Metadata','0','-1','false'}; private String[] apex_schema_type_info = new String[]{'http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata','true','false'}; private String[] field_order_type_info = new String[]{'records'}; } public virtual class Metadata { public String fullName; private String[] fullName_type_info = new String[]{'fullName','http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema','string','0','1','false'}; private String[] apex_schema_type_info = new String[]{'http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata','true','false'}; private String[] field_order_type_info = new String[]{'fullName'}; } public class CustomField extends Metadata { public String type = 'CustomField'; public String fullName;
[...] public Boolean externalId; [...] private String[] type_att_info = new String[]{'xsi:type'};
[...] private String[] externalId_type_info = new String[]{'externalId','http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema','boolean','0','1','false'}; [...] } '''
Adding "public boolean externalId;" to the Metadata class results in the next field being reported as missing. I think the instruction to create CustomField instances is in the "xsi:type='CustomField'" attribute of the tag, which uses a different namespace (which you can see I've been fiddling with).