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

Model your data


I've seen countless orgs where objects and fields have been created just because someone said hey, can we have a field for X? This can lead to a number of problems, ranging from data skew to terribly slow code. Thankfully, a little forethought can prevent this. Data modeling can be hard to do, especially if you're struggling with conflicting stakeholders and their understandings of the platform. I sometimes find it helpful to take a page from consulting and ask the stakeholders to collaboratively answer three questions. First, ask what is the clearest, most succinct statement of the problem. Secondly, ask what is the clearest, most succinct statement of the ideal solution. Lastly, ask if the stakeholders have any ideas on implementing the ideal solution. These questions need to be answered by the stakeholders, but they need to know going in that you're not just going to adopt the first solution they come up with. Oftentimes, adding a field to an object is no big deal. However...