Salesforce: Some Insights

I was recently chatting with a childhood friend (rare thanks to COVID19, life is not so fast, for now) . He's a researcher and a Six Sigma expert. He mentioned he was facing a problem wherein he needs to extract google play app reviews. Now, being the programmer at heart (for good and bad), I thought it would be easy to crack. I stumbled upon various techniques and found a better/ faster way to get it done. Hereby sharing my journey. Challenge(s) Retrieve user reviews for google play app store for given app App is related to COVID-19 for India so have almost thousands of reviews being posted every single day. So, in short, large data volume Google play page doesn't make it easy either. Due to nature of minified javascript and dynamic event injection, user experience, it's a much complicated environment for data extraction Paging incorporates both infinity scrolling and button based next page functionality Solutions thought/ tried RPA - (I'm not an RPA expert, not yet)

Recently, I was working on a project, wherein the organization was undergoing complete restructuring (merger, re-organization) and added to that re-vamp of CRM to improve Sales operations. As an integral part of data security. There was a need to review and redesign role hierarchy. Long story short, we ended up with a large list of roles (400+). We could have assigned someone to manually create these roles, but due to obvious reasons, I wanted to get this handled via script. I want to share a quick code snippet which can help you generate roles en-masse, without having to put in boring and gruesome hours of manually creating roles. [ Important: This solution will work when you have unique role names] SETUP Create the top level role manually at desired hierarchy level. For e.g. in our sample script, we used "CEO" role to build new hierarchy under CEO role DATA PREPARATION Firstly, as an approach of user onboarding we followed following steps: Created a l

We all have faced challenges while working in different enterprise environments, where there may be lot of controls/ checks/ red-tape to get by. In such situations, getting access to simple tools (even git) can take lot of time. Note: This tutorial is to be followed at your own risk, as it may not be complaint to your organization's IT policies. What is SFDX? SFDX is a command line utility for managing salesforce builds/ deployments. Being command line, it can be easily embedded to automation chains, to help build fully automated build and deployment processes. To get started, refer  https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/trails/sfdx_get_started Setup SFDX on Windows machine without admin access As you may have already realized, SFDX installation needs admin access to one's machine. Which may be a luxury a lot of developers may not have. So, i tried to provide a step-by-step guide to setup SFDX on your computer without any admin access Steps: Note:

Image Credit: Visualstudio marketplace Why? In case you don’t know Salesforce is phasing out Force.com IDE (planned for June 2018) to promote newer IDE choices. There are already many IDEs out there to take Eclipse based Force.com IDE’s place. However, Salesforce is officially promoting Microsoft Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code) as official IDE. What is VS Code? VS Code is a platform-independent, light-weight and keyboard focused IDE for Salesforce (sorry for folks who loved menus and GUI). VS Code does have visual menus and options, however, using keyboard shortcuts is just do damn fast. There is surely some learning curve involved. But, once you get rolling, you would hate using mouse, as it takes a lot of work to raise your hand, move mouse, point and click and navigate, when you can just press “Ctrl + /” to comment current code selection. VS Code features Lightweight – In case  you have worked a lot with Eclipse, you might have noticed that it was a memory hogging

With latest announcement of Lightning Web Components, Salesforce development ecosystem (Lightning Platform) moves one step closer to using web standards of UI development. It is definitely quite welcome move, as it helps in learning and utilizing skills which are not confined to Salesforce ecosystem. You must read this official Salesforce blog post to get more background details on why and what of lightning web components. Background User interface development has evolved drastically in past decade. With introduction of AngujarJS (2010), javascript based front end development became more modularized and then with React (2015) it became much faster, lightweight and component driven. So, front end layer is no longer confined to lightweight ui and graphics. Instead, with Single Page Applications (SPA), you can have pretty much an entire application running on browser (serverless). Web Components " Web Components is a suite of different technologies allowing you

Some time back I posted a solution to generate PDF from Lightning components using in-memory data. Post url: http://www.vermanshul.com/2017/07/lightning-generate-pdf-from-lightning.html It was developed for a specific scenario, wherein we need to generate PDF where: User interface is Salesforce classic Initiated via Lightning Component Data doesn't exist within Salesforce and is completely in-memory As complex and tricky this situation was, we did end up finding a stable and equally tricky solution. However, I realize that there are still lack of solutions (or maybe my search skills are downgrading) to generate and automatically download PDF document from Lightning Experience, without using any lightning components, wherein data exists within Salesforce. You can use the earlier solution in that case, but it will be an overkill. There are various solutions available to generate PDF from javascript. But, I still think the plain old method of converting HTML to PDF (via