Salesforce: Some Insights

I presume, a lot of developers may be struggling to use right developer tools for salesforce development. It can be a further problem, if one doesn't have admin access on workstation, as lot of these tools just provide guidelines to install these tools. So this article covers setting up developer machine, without any installation process. In essence, you can setup a fully working Salesforce development environment on your workstation without any admin access. Note: This is logically part 2 of setting up dev machine without admin access. If you haven't gone through my earlier article of setting up SFDX on your workstation, without installation, I would recommend starting with this article Quick Tips: Setup SFDX Manually without Admin access What is Visual Studio Code? Visual studio code is an open source Interactive Development Environment (IDE) for programmers/ developers. It provides various capabilities and features for faster application development and is primari...

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 hog...

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...

Much has been written and presented around Salesforce single organisation and multi-organisation strategies. But, still the question is asked quite frequently. There are really good articles and blogs and I'm hereby trying to compile the information and add my views to it, to provide a summary. Single Org. Approach In a single org. approach, an organisation maintains one single Salesforce org. all their required operations (planned to be executed via Salesforce) are executed via same org. Ideal for: Small and Medium Businesses Pros Less environment maintenance overhead Uniform processes - a very good opportunity for organisations which want to implement uniform processes/ functionalities across all units Easier user provisioning - once a user is setup, they have access to required functionalities Cons Complicated processes as organisation grows larger and include various operations/ geographies Increased application conflicts - with same processes being used...

Note: The main content for this blog post was shared by my friend and colleague Shriram Kabra. There are loads of blogs and articles around managing viewstate in Visualforce pages. As you would know, viewstate is primarily a serialized form of controller state between postbacks. It is very helpful to retain controller's state between client's browser and server. How viewstate works? Every time user opens a visualforce page, Salesforce executes related controller(s). As per controller logic, data is retrieved/ created within memory. This data can also be considered as controller state. If you monitor the lifecycle of Salesforce object (object of controller), it ends as soon as it responds to browser and loses its state. Technically, all subsequent requests for it are fresh page loads. In order for visualforce to retain this state between all postbacks, it needs to store this state somewhere. This is where Viewstate comes handy. While rendering visualforce page,...

What are validation rules? While creating any application, one of the most crucial building block is clean and good data. We do get ability to define required fields on field and page layout level, but there can be complex scenarios where the business rule needs multiple fields to ascertain data quality.  Salesforce provides a very helpful feature called "Validation rule" to ensure administrators/ developers can create custom validation rules on Salesforce objects. These validation rules help ensure that any record being created or updated qualifies to defined business rules. If not, then developers/ administrators can display required error message. Validation rule constitutes of:- Formula - formula to evaluate business rule. If formula evaluates to TRUE, validation error is thrown, else it's considered as validation success Error message - error message to be displayed on validation failure Location - Enables admin/ developer to define location to displa...