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Dev projects

A dev project is a working set of Salesforce things — fields, flows, classes, records, saved queries — pulled together because they belong to one piece of work.

Why they exist

Salesforce changes don't live in one place. A typical "ship the new shipment status flow" project touches:

  • A custom field or two
  • A validation rule
  • A flow definition
  • A test apex class
  • A permission set adjustment
  • Maybe a record type

These live in different tabs in Setup. In Lightning, you keep them together by living in browser tabs and a notes file. In sf-deck, you collect them into a dev project and they stay together — across sessions, across orgs.

How they're organised

A dev project has:

  • A name + description (the bit you'd write in your ticket).
  • A list of items — references to specific Salesforce things.
  • Optional bundles — sfdx project directories linked to the project. More on that in Bundles.

Items are per-origin-org. The same Account sObject can sit in the same project under multiple orgs. This is the point: when you're collecting context for a piece of work that touches dev + UAT + prod, the project records what each org's version looks like.

How to use them

  1. Create — sf-deck project create --name "Shipment revamp" or n on /dev-projects.
  2. Collect — press Ctrl+K on any list (a flow, a field, a record) to add the cursored row to a project. Pick from a list of existing projects or create a new one inline.
  3. Drill — open /dev-projects and Enter on a project. You'll see every item, filterable by kind (sObject, field, flow, apex, LWC, permset, …).
  4. Filter by kind — [ ] on the items list cycles the kind chips (All / Objects / Fields / Flows / Apex / …).
  5. Untag scope — by default the items list shows only the active org's items. \ toggles to "all orgs" so you can see the project's full cross-org reach.

Cleanup and rename

  • e on a project renames + re-describes it.
  • d on a project deletes it (with confirmation when it has items).
  • d on an item removes it from the project.

Importing from an existing sfdx project

If you already have a Salesforce repo, sf-deck can ingest its package.xml and create a dev project that mirrors it:

sf-deck project create --name "Existing repo"
sf-deck project import-bundle \
  --project-id <id> \
  --path /path/to/sfdx-project \
  --org <org-alias>

Idempotent — re-running skips duplicates.

What's stored where

DevProject items live in ~/.sf-deck/devprojects.db. Nothing leaves your machine. The items are just references — sf-deck doesn't store copies of the metadata itself unless you materialise a bundle.