Salesforce users are granted access to Custom Applications by profiles.
If the user is assigned a profile that is selected for an application, then the user can access the application.
If a Custom Application's profile assignment has changed, you can use Gearset to migrate the changes to another org or source control system.
Deploying permission changes
Run a comparison with the Custom application and Profile metadata types included in your metadata filter.
Alternatively, you can use our pre-defined filter named Default profiles and permission sets comparison (this filter already includes both Custom application and Profile metadata types).
Is your Custom App a part of a managed package?
If so, then you will also need to select All on Include managed packages in the metadata filter.
Read more about the correct way of including managed packages in this article: Comparing managed package metadata with Gearset
The comparison results will show the individual changes under the Profile: Application visibility metadata type.
The change shown on the above screenshot in my comparison results is because in my source org (Test1) in Home > Users > Profiles > Sales User > Edit, I have made a few changes to Custom App Settings, including setting App Launcher as Default.
Why is my change not showing under Profile or Custom application metadata?
It's worth knowing that because Gearset shows metadata in its constituent components, the Profile and the Custom application will not show any differences themselves, while the Profile: Application visibility will show up as Different.
Example of the Profile metadata showing No difference:
Similarly as the Custom application metadata:
Naturally, if either Profile or Custom application metadata types show as Different - this would mean that there were other changes made to these components other than assigning permission changes such as application visibility.
How to deploy the change?
You can then deploy this specific change without fear of overwriting other changes associated with the wider profile.
Gearset may automatically include Profile metadata type as part of your deployment (even if a given Profile shows as 'No difference' in the comparison results).
This is an expected behaviour. You can expect it to happen when we detect that Profile metadata needs to be included in the deployment package to make sure that package validates successfully against the target org.