OmniStudio Metadata API Support - Step in Right Direction

OmniStudio for Vlocity - Legacy

Vlocity (aka OmniStudio for Vlocity) was the original version of a set of services, components, and data model objects used to create Vlocity Industry Cloud apps.?OmniStudio for Vlocity products are available as part of a Vlocity Industry managed package (Health and Insurance; Communications, Media, and Energy; and Public Sector) and are built with custom objects. More information can be found here.

DevOps Challenges for OmniStudio for Vlocity

There’s a key difference between Vlocity (aka OmniStudio for Vlocity) and most other Salesforce customizations: Vlocity configuration is described with data, not metadata. For this reason Vlocity DataPacks can’t be deployed using Salesforce’s Metadata API or change sets. Salesforce provides two tools specifically for Vlocity deployments. Vlocity Build can be used for running deployments from the CLI, while Vlocity’s IDX Workbench is a UI-based tool.

The downside of using either Vlocity Build or IDX Workbench is that you now have two separate deployment tools — one for metadata and one for Vlocity. In turn, this creates more problems:

• You have to run extra deployments for Vlocity DataPacks in addition to your metadata deployments, which takes up more of your time.
• It’s inefficient having multiple tools for one job - in this case, deployments. It’s easier for your team to have fewer tools to learn.
• Your audit trail for deployments is split.
• It’s harder to integrate Vlocity deployments into your DevOps process.

More information can be found here.

OmniStudio - Today and Future

Starting Summer'21 release, Salesforce introduced OmniStudio package, which was built using the standard data model. More information can be found here.

DevOps for OmniStudio

Starting Spring '22, Salesforce introduced OmniStudio Metadata API Support. Deploy and retrieve OmniStudio standard objects through the Metadata and Tooling API by enabling the OmniStudio Metadata setting in your org. OmniStudio Metadata supports OmniProcess (OmniScript and Integration Procedure), OmniDataTransform (DataRaptor), and OmniUiCard (FlexCard) standard objects.

With this feature, you can deploy OmniStudio metadata with rest of Salesforce Metadata. This feature removes all the problem regarding deployment as mentioned above.

Ensure that you’re components meet required naming conventions. Enabling the OmniStudio Metadata setting runs a process that validates your component's naming convention. If one name is invalid, enabling fails. You’ll receive an email listing the names to update. Your component name must include alphanumeric characters only, and can’t include spaces or special characters such as underscores.

How

• Go to Setup in your org, enter?OmniStudio Settings?in Quick Find, and select?OmniStudio Settings.
• Click the?OmniStudio Metadata?toggle to enable.

Showcase

With the assumption that you have configured Visual Studio Code to support Salesforce development life cycle, go to Org Browser and you can see OmniStudio related metadata as shown below: -

Let's download OmniScript components and you can go to the project and see them as shown below: -

You can see in the above image that if a single OmniScript has two versions then it will be show as two separate components.

Now you can use your existing CI/CD setup to deploy OmniStudio metadata without any changes in the current deployment scripts/setup.