A Very Special Episode
If you haven’t heard about the GameStop stock situation then I genuinely don’t know where you’ve been.
And if you’re like me and most of the people I work with, you’ve been checking that ticker roughly every four minutes all week trying to work out when it’s going to the moon.
So I built something so you never have to leave Salesforce to do it. A GME ticker that sits in your utility bar, pulls the current stock price, and refreshes whenever you want it to.
Your salespeople can now stay fully informed without ever alt-tabbing away from your org. You’re welcome.
What’s Actually Going On Here
Silliness aside, this is a genuinely useful pattern and there are three real techniques in it worth stealing:
1. Calling an external API from Apex and getting structured data back.
2. Using a wrapper class to deserialize the JSON response cleanly.
3. Putting a Lightning Web Component in the utility bar, which is a surprisingly underused piece of Salesforce.
Swap “stock price” for “order status” or “shipment tracking” and this is a genuinely useful production pattern.
The Apex Side
public with sharing class StockTickerController
{
@AuraEnabled(cacheable=false)
public static StockQuote getQuote(String ticker)
{
HttpRequest req = new HttpRequest();
req.setEndpoint('callout:StockApi/quote?symbol=' + ticker);
req.setMethod('GET');
HttpResponse res = new Http().send(req);
if (res.getStatusCode() != 200)
{
throw new AuraHandledException('Could not retrieve the quote');
}
return (StockQuote) JSON.deserialize(res.getBody(), StockQuote.class);
}
public class StockQuote
{
@AuraEnabled public String symbol;
@AuraEnabled public Decimal price;
@AuraEnabled public Decimal changePercent;
}
}Three things worth pointing out.cacheable=false is deliberate. A cached method would happily serve you a five minute old price, which rather defeats the purpose. Cacheable methods also can’t do callouts.callout:StockApi is a Named Credential, so your API key isn’t in the code.
Every property on the inner class has @AuraEnabled. Miss one and it silently arrives as undefined in your JavaScript.
The Component
import { LightningElement } from 'lwc';
import getQuote from '@salesforce/apex/StockTickerController.getQuote';
export default class StockTicker extends LightningElement {
quote;
error;
connectedCallback() {
this.refreshQuote();
}
async refreshQuote() {
try {
this.quote = await getQuote({ ticker: 'GME' });
this.error = undefined;
} catch (e) {
this.error = e.body ? e.body.message : 'Something went wrong';
}
}
get isUp() {
return this.quote && this.quote.changePercent > 0;
}
}Note connectedCallback() loading the price before the component renders, which I covered in this quick tip.
An imperative Apex call rather than @wire, because we want to refresh on demand rather than reactively.
Getting It Into The Utility Bar
The bit worth knowing. Add this to your .js-meta.xml:
<targets>
<target>lightning__UtilityBar</target>
</targets>Then Setup → App Manager → Edit your app → Utility Items → Add Utility Item and pick your component.
The utility bar is genuinely underrated. It’s persistent across every page, it’s always one click away, and it’s perfect for anything a user needs constant access to without navigating anywhere. Same targets logic as adding a component to a record page.
Before You Deploy This To Production
Some genuine advice buried under the joke.
Mind your callout limits. 100 per transaction, and a daily API allowance. A ticker every user refreshes constantly adds up faster than you’d think. Consider caching the price in Platform Cache for thirty seconds so a hundred users share one callout.
Handle the API being down. Free stock APIs are exactly as reliable as you’d expect. Fail gracefully rather than showing a stack trace in the utility bar.
Maybe check with your manager. Deploying a stock ticker to the sales team’s org is a decision with, let’s say, cultural implications.
None of this is investment advice, obviously. I’m a Salesforce developer.
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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend
Advanced Apex Programming
Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture
Mastering Salesforce DevOps
Good Non-SF Specific Development Books:
Clean Code
Clean Architecture
