Merge Salesforce Package.xml Files

So I’ve recently been asked to play a larger role in doing our version control, which is not my strongest suite so it’s definitely been a learning experience. Our process at the moment involves creating a feature branch in bit bucket for each new user story. Folks do whatever work they need to do, and then create a change set. From that they generate a zip file that contains all the stuff they worked on and a package.xml file (using the super cool ORGanizer chrome plugin I just found out about). Once they get that they send it over to me and I get their changes setup as a feature branch and then request a pull to get it back into the master branch. Now I’m not sure if this is the best way to do things or not but in each new branch we need to append all the contents of the new package.xml into the existing package.xml. Much to my surprise I couldn’t find a quick clean easy way to merge two XML files. Tried a few online tools and nothing really seemed to work right, so me being me I decided to write something to do it for me. I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this, but then in an instant I realized that from my post a couples weeks ago I can convert XML into a javscript object easily. Once I do that then I can simply merge the objects in memory and build a new file. One small snag I found is that the native javacript methods for merging objects actually overwrites any properties of the same name, it doesn’t smash them together like I was hoping. So with a little bit of elbow grease I managed to write some utility methods for smashing all the data together. To use this simply throw your XML files in the packages directory and run the ‘runMerge.bat’ (this does require you to have node.js installed). It will spit out a new package.xml in the root directory that is a merge of all your package.xml files. Either way, hope this helps someone.

UPDATE (5/19): Okay after squashing a few bugs I now proudly release a version of package merge that actually like…. works (I hope). Famous last words I know.
UPDATE (5/20): Now supports automatic sorting of the package members, having XML files in sub-directories in the packages folder, forcing a package version, and merging all data into a master branch package file for continual cumulative add ons.
https://github.com/Kenji776/SFPackageMerge