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Salesforce Apex Master Class (Ep. 4) – What is an IDE?

What is an IDE?

Let’s review what an IDE is and why it’s so incredibly helpful to you as a developer in Salesforce and beyond. As a developer, you’re encouraged to use an IDE, since it can make your work so much easier.

An IDE is an integrated development environment, where you can combine a wide variety of development tools to do your work much faster and more efficiently every day. Now, let’s check out an example (below) of an IDE at work. This particular IDE is IntelliJ, and I’m using a plug-in that allows me to do Salesforce development called the Illuminated Cloud 2 plug-in.

Demoing the Benefits of Using an IDE

An IDE like IntelliJ here will make your life, and the lives of your developer teammates, so much easier. In this interface, I have my code editor so I can write Apex code or a lightning web component, among other things. I can also analyze debug logs here in this IDE, or even run anonymous Apex. But why should you use an IDE and not just a developer console? An IDE like IntelliJ has many features that developer consoles don’t.

The first major benefit is if you want to know everywhere that a class is used in your codebase, you can simply copy the name of the class, then press CTRL-shift-F, and then the IDE searches for the class in all of the code in your Salesforce environment. There are also a litany of other hotkeys that will make traversal through your code base considerably easier. Shortcuts like that aren’t available in the developer console.

Autocomplete is another major advantage in using an IDE like IntelliJ with Illuminated Cloud 2. You can type “system.” and the IDE knows methods are available for that system class in the Apex language. So, you it will present to you a list of autocompleted methods that you can select from and have your code auto-completed for you. By contrast, the Salesforce developer console’s auto-complete features struggle and sometimes just outright do not work. This makes it easy for programmers, like you, to know all your options without having to look them up elsewhere in documentation.

There’s even more an IDE can do for you. For example, you can enable version control, allowing you to create local backups of your code, so you can revert back if something goes wrong. You sure can’t do that in a developer console! Meanwhile, you can find more useful stuff in the settings menu too, such as setting all the defaults for code style for a specified language, such as Apex or Javascript. All that will be automatically formatted for you. You can export all this to other developers on your team too, and make everyone’s code consistent. That’s an example of the convenient, time-saving efficiency of an IDE.

Another option is to run your Apex tests in the IDE, and it will display coverage next to the classes that it tests. Yes, you can do that in developer consoles too, but an IDE like IntelliJ will conveniently show you which classes the test covered, and even break down what happened in those tests, such as line coverage. Pretty cool, huh? And this is just the start; an IDE can do a whole lot more!

To recap, an IDE like IntelliJ will make your life as a programmer faster, more convenient, more direct, more consistent, and more intuitive than ever before, acting like a souped-up developer console with more options so you can get more work done. Give it a try, and see what you can accomplish with the power of an IDE! Until next time!

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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend

Advanced Apex Programming
Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture
Mastering Salesforce DevOps
Apex Design Patterns Book

Good Non-SF Specific Development Books:

Clean Code
Clean Architecture
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software Book

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Salesforce Development Tutorial: How to Setup Uncrustify to automatically format your code in Visual Studio Code

Why would you want to setup Auto Code Formatting?

Aside from the fact that it’s both magical and amazing, it also enables you to easily do a couple things:

1) If you get onboarded to a project with a horrific looking codebase with nightmarish formatting, you can fix that by running a single command on the entire thing to fix it. This saves you what would otherwise take dozens if not hundreds of hours of time

2) If you are on a large team of developers and you want your code to all look the same (at least on your commit to your codebase), you can create one code style configuration file and distribute it to the entire team for use. This way your code all looks and reads the same which makes everything just a little bit nicer to deal with.

There are other reasons but those are the two major ones I can come up with off the top of my head here, lol.

Why use Uncrustify for auto-code formatting?

I like Uncrustify for automatic code formatting because it has so many configuration options, 735 in fact! It allows you to configure how you like your code to look as opposed to many other popular auto-code formatting tools that are “opinionated” that don’t give you that flexibility.

How to Setup Uncrustify

To utilize Uncrustify with your Salesforce projects in Visual Studio Code you need to do the following (Github wiki is here):

1) Install Uncrustify locally on your machine. I would suggest installing it via a package manager like chocolatey or npm if you are using a windows machine (you may need to download npm or chocolatey if you haven’t already)

2) Install the Uncrustify Visual Studio Code plugin. Restart VS Code after installing it.

3) In Visual Studio Code press Ctrl + Shift + P to bring up the command palette and then type the following command: Preferences: Open Settings (JSON). This should bring up a JSON file with your VS Code settings.

4) Inside the settings.json file you opened in the last step, add the following lines:

"uncrustify.langOverrides": {
    "apex": "JAVA",
    "apex-anon": "JAVA"
},

"[apex]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "LaurentTreguier.uncrustify"
 },

"[javascript]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "LaurentTreguier.uncrustify"
}

5) Save your settings.json file

6) Press Ctrl + Shift + P to bring up the command palette again and enter the following command: Uncrustify: Create Default Config. After running this command you should see an uncrustify.cfg file in your VS Code project

7) Open the uncrustify.cfg file and update all your settings in it (This is just a nice UI with a ton of different options, so nothing complicated here). Make sure to hit the save button in the top right corner when you are done!

8) Once you finished open a file you would like to have code formatting done to and press Alt+Shift+F

And that’s it boiz and gurlz! Enjoy your auto-formatted code!

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Salesforce Development Tutorial: How to Setup Visual Studio Code for Salesforce Development

Why use an IDE?

First things first… after you use an IDE you will never ask this question again. IT MAKES YOUR LIFE SO MUCH EASIER! Please take the time to leverage an IDE when doing development. Your work will take a fraction of the time it would take otherwise.

Ever wish your code editor would auto-complete method names, field names, object names, etc for you? Well an IDE will do that along with tons of other things that will simply development.

As for why you would pick Visual Studio Code specifically for Salesforce Development, you would do that because it’s an excellent IDE and it’s the only IDE with plugins that Salesforce itself maintains. That’s right, THE ONLY ONE! There are two other big contenders, the Illuminated Cloud 2 for IntelliJ and The Welkins Suite, but the Salesforce Extension pack for VSCode is the only one upkept directly by Salesforce. As such, it has a large team of developers constantly working to keep it up to date and as useful as possible for your work as a developer on the platform.

How do we setup Visual Studio Code for Salesforce Development?

It’s not super complicated, but can be confusing your first handful of times setting things up. Before I get started, if you’d rather read my GitHub wiki on the subject you can find it here.

You first need to install a handful of things if you haven’t already:

1) Install VSCode
2) Install the Salesforce CLI
3) Optionally install Node.js and npm (there are a lot of great packages in existence you can leverage, but we’re not gonna over those here, just know it can come in handy down the line)

After you have installed VSCode and the Salesforce CLI, you then need to open VSCode, click on the extensions icon and search for the Salesforce Extension Pack. After you find the extension pack, install it.

How to Setup a Project (Using the org based development model)

Before I get into this, if you’re not sure what an org based development model is, it basically means your source of truth for your codebase is still your production org instead of a repository. In a later tutorial I will go over how to actually leverage SFDX and a repo based model, but I want to ease people into this and I know from being involved in twenty three different orgs now, the majority of clients are still stuck in the org based model… so we’re gonna start here.

There is one VERY IMPORTANT HOT KEY YOU NEED TO REMEMBER IN VSCODE and that hotkey is the one that brings up the command palette Ctrl+Shift+P. Remember it, love it, appreciate it, don’t forget it (or do and just come back to this article to remember it).

Alright, now that those things are out of the way, let’s go through the steps to setup our project:

1) Bring up the command palette and run the SFDX: Create Project with Manifest command (technically creating it with a manifest is optional these days, but you’ll see why it’s still beneficial later).

2) When prompted, choose the standard template for your manifest file (unless you would prefer an empty or analytics based template). The standard template creates an xml file that would pull all your code from the org.

3) After your SFDX project has been created it’s in your best interest to find the sfdx-project.json file, open it and update the sfdcLoginUrl to have the login URL for your org. Some orgs have MyDomains they have to login through. It’s super useful for those scenarios.

4) After you update the sfdx-project.json, pull up the command palette again and enter the command SFDX: Authorize an Org. This command will ask you what URL you would like to use to connect to your SF org, ask you to enter an alias for your org (this can be anything) and eventually bring up a browser window and allow you to authenticate/login to your org you want to connect to.

5) That’s it, your project is setup! But now how to do we pull in the metadata from our org into our local project? Still super simple, but the next section covers it.

How to retrieve metadata from your org

There are actually two ways to do this, one leverages the manifest file we created earlier when setting up our project and the other uses the org browser. Let’s check out both methods.

Retrieving Metadata from the Org Browser

To the left of your Visual Studio Code workspace, after successfully setting up your project and connecting to your org, you should see a cloud icon. If you click that cloud icon you will bring up the org browser. This allows you to bring up all the metadata in your org. If you hover over a metadata item, to the right of it you will see an icon shaped like a cloud with an arrow. Clicking this icon will allow you to pull the metadata into your local project.

Retrieving Metadata using the manifest package.xml file

Before we get into this, there is an extension called “Salesforce Package.xml Generator” that will make setting up these package.xml files way easier.

This method is very useful if you intend to pull a ton of specific data from your org into your projects consistently. It’s also quite a bit faster than the org browser is in those situations.

To use this method to pull in metadata, do the following:

1) You should see a “manifest” folder in your project. Inside that folder there should be a file called “package.xml”. You can either leave it alone or update the package.xml file to include more metadata types to pull from your org. When you retrieve data in the next step, you will only retrieve data types declared in your package.xml file. For more information please check out the supplementary links section of this wiki article

2) In the command palette run the SFDX: Retrieve Source in Manifest from Org command. This should pull in all the metadata from your org that you outlined in your package.xml file.

Other Useful Things To Setup

The above stuff is the only stuff that’s required to get up and running, but the stuff I outline below will make your life suck way less.

How to get auto-complete to work for object fields

1) In the command palette run the SFDX: Refresh SObject Definitions command so that you can get autocompletion on your object fields.

If you want your SObject definitions to automatically refresh every time you open your VSCode project, do the following:

In the extension settings under “Salesforce Apex Configuration” there is a checkbox for “Enable-sobject-refresh-on-startup”. This automatically refreshes your sobjects from your org when your project is loaded.

How to Auto-Deploy to your org on save

If you didn’t know, by default you won’t auto-deploy to your org when you save your code. You have to right click on your file in the project and select the option that deploys the code to your org. If you want auto-deploy to be setup, follow these steps:

1) In VSCode go to File -> Preferences -> Settings.
2) Click the Extensions drop down
3) Click the Salesforce Feature Previews extension
4) Check the box next to “Push-or-deploy-on-save”
5) It’s also in your best interest to enable the “Detect Conflicts At Sync” feature preview in settings if you use the auto-deploy on save feature. By enabling this you will be informed if your save has any conflicts with other developers code before you actually deploy it to your org.

Still want more info?

In the GitHub wiki article I have even more useful stuff and I update it frequently. Check it out!

Get Coding With The Force Merch!!

We now have a redbubble store setup so you can buy cool Coding With The Force merchandise! Please check it out! Every purchase goes to supporting the blog and YouTube channel.

Get Shirts Here!
Get Cups, Artwork, Coffee Cups, Bags, Masks and more here!

Check Out More Coding With The Force Stuff!

If you liked this post make sure to follow us on all our social media outlets to stay as up to date as possible with everything!

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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend

Advanced Apex Programming
Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture
Mastering Salesforce DevOps