Use the Metadata API for CRM Analytics Assets and User XMD

Every time your Salesforce organization is customized, its metadata is modified. Editing page layouts, creating a custom field, or adding a CRM Analytics dataflow are all metadata updates. Metadata is the information that describes the configuration of your organization and of your CRM Analytics assets. It’s data about your data. For example, the metadata type WaveLens includes properties that describe the lens—what dataset it uses, the label of the dashboard, what visualization widget type it uses (pivottable, stackvbar, heatmap, and so on).

You can create your own custom metadata types, which enable you to create your own setup objects whose records are metadata rather than data. Rather than building apps from data records in custom objects or custom settings, you can create custom metadata types and add metadata records, with all the manageability that comes with metadata: package, deploy, and upgrade.

You can create dashboards with reusable components. These components are a type of dashboard widget that contain other widgets, pages, and Lightning Web Components. The metadata type WaveComponent allows you to create and distribute dashboard components via packages and change sets.

While the Metadata API is the foundation on which change sets and packaging is built, developers can use the Metadata API to manipulate their CRM Analytics assets. For example, your application could retrieve metadata about your dashboards and back it up to (and restore from) some repository, effectively providing version control.

You can package and deploy user XMD too. User XMD is a JSON document that allows an application to override certain metadata for a dataset. You can govern settings to control how the data is presented—for example, colors, formats, and labels. To deploy the overridden dataset metadata, you must package the user XMD attributes. Metadata API support allows migration tools to migrate datasets with user XMD between orgs—for example, you can migrate user XMD overrides from sandbox to production. Partners can deploy their application-specific user XMD with their AppExchange package. They retain control of the user XMD and can update it with future package versions. Refer to the WaveXmd metadata type in the Metadata API Developer Guide.