We have seen we can retrieve metadata from a sandbox, and we can deploy changes to a sandbox using the Ant Migration Tool. But sometimes we don't need some features and we want to delete some components or files such as objects, fields, and so on from our Salesforce organization. We need to create one more file along with package.xml that is destructiveChanges.xml. The format of the destructiveChanges.xmldelete manifest will be the same as package.xml, only wildcard characters are not accepted in a delete manifest.
Delete component is same process as deploying components with delete manifest file. We need to add a list of the components to delete in destructiveChanges.xml. A sample file to delete a custom object is as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Package xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
<types>
<members>MyTestObject__c</members...