Book Image

Mastering Apex Programming

By : Paul Battisson
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Apex Programming

5 (1)
By: Paul Battisson

Overview of this book

As applications built on the Salesforce platform are now a key part of many organizations, developers are shifting focus to Apex, Salesforce’s proprietary programming language. As a Salesforce developer, it is important to understand the range of tools at your disposal, how and when to use them, and best practices for working with Apex. Mastering Apex Programming will help you explore the advanced features of Apex programming and guide you in delivering robust solutions that scale. This book starts by taking you through common Apex mistakes, debugging, exception handling, and testing. You'll then discover different asynchronous Apex programming options and develop custom Apex REST web services. The book shows you how to define and utilize Batch Apex, Queueable Apex, and Scheduled Apex using common scenarios before teaching you how to define, publish, and consume platform events and RESTful endpoints with Apex. Finally, you'll learn how to profile and improve the performance of your Apex application, including architecture trade-offs. With code examples used to facilitate discussion throughout, by the end of the book, you'll have developed the skills needed to build robust and scalable applications in Apex.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Triggers, Testing, and Security
8
Section 2 – Asynchronous Apex and Apex REST
15
Section 3 – Apex Performance

Which tool to use?

We have now seen a number of options to debug our code and improve our workflow away from the standard workflow for most developers, which are usually as follows:

  1. Perform action in Salesforce UI.
  2. Review debug log.
  3. Update code.
  4. Repeat.

Hopefully, it has now become clearer that replicating any issue in Apex code through a unit test will speed up our debug cycle immensely as it allows us to utilize the debugging tools available to us in VS Code and SFDX without a need to return to the browser repeatedly. I often find as well that the process of methodically writing a unit test to reproduce the error can make my brain get a small "aha" moment, allowing me to fix the issue straight away. If this doesn't happen though, we are left with two main improved ways of debugging:

  • Filtered log levels and streaming of logs to the terminal for inspection
  • Using the Apex Replay Debugger

A sensible question is, therefore,...