Hi angusmaul,
Thank you for letting us know about your issue with The Welkin Suite.
The reason why this approach is still not implemented in TWS is because Salesforce's development model right now assumes the org as the only "source of truth". This why all approaches to work with Salesforce and Git always results in additional issues and performance/productivity trade-offs. We do not want to affect the general approach to the projects in The Welkin Suite - because of it's current organization we are able to provide a lot of different features as well as provide improved performance compared to the Force.com IDE.
Especially this is actual in terms of Salesforce's new SalesforceDX development approach, where code repository is the only "source of truth" - this why we would like to get as much details as possible on the Salesforce's own vision of the proper development process with Git. As soon as their development workflow will get finalized we will for sure implement it's support as one of the highest priorities.
In the current situation I suggest using Ant (Salesforce) Migration Tool for operations related to the repository operations, while keeping The Welkin Suite as a main working tool. Such approach will allow you to enjoy all of The Welkin Suite's benefits like improved performance, Apex Retrospective Debugger, great Debug Logs Viewer and others while keeping very low overhead on repository changes management.
With this approach I assume the following preparations:
- Configure a standard Ant Migration Tool deploy task for Salesforce to use your org's credentials. With this task you will be able to deploy changes from the git to the org with just a simple command line command.
- (Optional) Create a simple bat file which will perform a pull from the Git repository and subsequently execute the Ant task from the first step.
- Create a project in TWS (not in the repository) pointing to that org.
- Configure a standard Ant Migration Tool retrieve task for Salesforce to use your org's credentials. With this task you will be able to retrieve changes from the org to your git repository.
- (Optional) Create a simple bat file which will perform ant-retrieve and subsequently commit&push your changes to the Git repository.
With this preparations your workflow will look like this:
- Execute a bat file to pull from Git and deploy to the org
- Open TWS project and pull changes from Salesforce
- Develop in TWS
- When you ready to commit execute a bat file to push to Git
In average the preparations should not require more than 30-40 minutes for one time, while regular overhead should not be more than 5 minutes per commit - this amount of time can be easily saved with The Welkin Suite within a day just with the overall performance improvements, not talking about the Retrospective Debugger, for example.
Hope this helps.
Thank you,
Vladimir