Updating reports with Eclipse and the Force.com IDE

I came across a question on the Salesforce.com Answers forum today and thought the answer might be useful to others.

Here is the original question: http://bit.ly/k3nKHD

The question concerned updating reports after a new Stage was created on the Opportunity Object.  Once the new stage was created and Opportunity records had been updated to use that new stage, any reports leveraging the old stage in their filters would be broken.  The poster of the question was hoping there was a faster way to identify the reports that filtered on that stage than opening each report individually.  I suggested using Eclipse and the Force.com IDE along with Notepad++ to get things done.  This will work with much more than just Stage, so insert your own search terms as desired.

The following assumes that you are already comfortable with Eclipse and the Force.com IDE:

The first thing you will want to do is download all of your report metadata to Eclipse.   If you have reports that are in Production and not your Sandbox then you will need to connect to your Production environment or refresh your Sandbox first.  If you do need to connect to Production just BE CAREFUL.

• Create a new project
• Include ‘reports’ or more specifically the report folders you are concerned with
• Let Eclipse refresh the project with the reports metadata

Now that you have all of the metadata for your reports, it is time to search through the metadata for the StageName to find all of the reports using that Stage.

• In Eclipse, navigate to the reports folder you just download. Right click and select properties
• Highlight and Note (or copy) the Location. This is the path where the metadata files are located
• Open a windows explorer window and navigate to the path you just copied

You should now see all of the folders containing your report metadata.

• Open Notepad++ click Search > Find in Files  (or just Ctrl+Shift+F)
• Enter your search term (in our case, the Stage) , make sure the ‘In all sub-folders’ box is checked and click the ‘Find All’
• A message will pop up saying “Searching… Press Enter to Cancel”. Don’t touch anything, just let it do it’s search, this may take a little while depending on how many files you have.  Clicking OK will cancel the search.

You should now have a list of files where the Stage has been found.  You can use this to narrow down the reports that need to be updated and hopefully cut down the time you spend updating your reports.

Note: It is possible to update your reports directly from the IDE as well.  If you choose to do that, make sure you back up the report data to another location in case something goes wrong.