Book Image

Mastering Application Development with Force.com

By : Kevin J. Poorman
Book Image

Mastering Application Development with Force.com

By: Kevin J. Poorman

Overview of this book

Force.com is an extremely powerful, scalable, and secure cloud platform, delivering a complete technology stack, ranging from databases and security to workflow and the user interface. With salesforce.com's Force.com cloud platform, you can build any business application and run it on your servers. The book will help you enhance your skillset and develop complex applications using Force.com. It gets you started with a quick refresher of Force.com's development tools and methodologies, and moves to an in-depth discussion of triggers, bulkification, DML order of operations, and trigger frameworks. Next, you will learn to use batchable and schedulable interfaces to process massive amounts of information asynchronously. You will also be introduced to Salesforce Lightning and cover components—including backend (apex) controllers, frontend (JavaScript) controllers, events, and attributes—in detail. Moving on, the book will focus on testing various apex components: what to test, when to write the tests, and—most importantly—how to test. Next, you will develop a changeset and use it to migrate your code from one org to another, and learn what other tools are out there for deploying metadata. You will also use command-line tools to authenticate and access the Force.com Rest sObject API and the Bulk sObject API; additionally, you will write a custom Rest endpoint, and learn how to structure a project so that multiple developers can work independently of each other without causing metadata conflicts. Finally, you will take an in-depth look at the overarching best practices for architecture (structure) and engineering (code) applications on the Force.com platform.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Application Development with Force.com
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating your own API


Up to this point in this chapter, we've been using APIs provided by Salesforce. In effect, we're calling into Salesforce to retrieve or manipulate data. These APIs are well thought out, but they have their limitations. For instance, you can create, read, edit, and delete records, but you can only edit and delete individual records. Additionally, the tree creation endpoint, which allows you to create dependent, related objects in a single call, is only in pilot with the Winter '16 release. To help facilitate complex integrations, Salesforce has provided us with the ability to create our own RESTful endpoints, assigning HTTP actions to custom methods that accept custom payloads. We do this by writing custom Apex classes and annotating the class with @RestResource and individual methods with the @httpGet, @httpPatch, @httpPost, and @httpDelete annotations. To illustrate this, let's build a custom REST resource that accepts an opportunity ID and returns the opportunity...