IntelliJ – Coding With The Force

October 21, 2022October 21, 2022

Design Patterns in Salesforce (Ep. 1) – What Are Design Patterns?

When Should You Learn About Design Patterns?

When you first start learning about software development, I’d recommend against beginning with design patterns. Why? If you start with design patterns, you might be misled and start thinking that all of your code must conform to a design pattern, which isn’t the case and makes the process of learning how to code even more complicated. You’ll end up confused and overwhelmed, and your code could end up overengineered and wonky.

Instead, I encourage you to start with the basic building blocks of code, and design a few applications without using any design patterns, and that can serve as a foundation for more advanced functions, such as design patterns, later on. After you’ve mastered the basics of coding, and experienced a handful of difficult development situations, you’ll be ready to go back and learn about design patterns, and use them to solve tricky and difficult problems or situations in the code you develop.

Also, I recommend you learn more about design principles before getting into design patterns since those principles guide the design patterns. Design patterns will make much more sense once you’ve got a handle on the underlying design principles. To learn more about design principles, you can also check out the book Clean Code by Robert Martin, a fantastic resource for any budding code writer.

What Are Design Patterns?

Once you’re comfortable with the basics of coding and design principles, it’s time for the third step: understanding design patterns! True to their name, design patterns are coding patterns that can help you fix tricky situations you’ll find yourself in while coding, but that’s just the start. Design patterns can also make your code more flexible and easier to read, and be more performant when you’re done writing it.

Suppose you wrote something, and it always takes 2-3 minutes to load. You might be able to use the Singleton pattern to only load something that is very time-consuming once, which will likely cut down on the page-load time. And that’s just one example. Design patterns use their patterns to fix practically any problem or mess you’ve got in your software, and certain design patterns can be prescribed for certain coding issues.

You can think of them as medicine for your code, such as a doctor prescribing either Advil, Tylenol, or Ibuprofin for your headache. Any three of those would work 90% of the time for your headache, and in the other 10%, you may need to try something else. It’s the same with design patterns; none of them is a guaranteed miracle fix for a coding issue, but they generally work, and a skilled developer can prescribe one for a development problem.

Which Design Patterns Should You Learn?

Make no bones about it: there are a lot of design patterns out there! I couldn’t possibly list them all. For now, though, we can narrow the field down to 23 particular design patterns that are best learned first, and they are widely used, too (and they’re well-regarded, too). They are described as the “gang of four” design patterns since they were designed by a quartet of people calling themselves the gang of four. They even wrote a book together on this topic titled Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. You can check it out to get plenty of in-depth information.

These 23 design patterns are sorted into three categories: behavioral design patterns, creational design patterns, and structural design patterns. These include design patterns that you’ve probably heard of before, such as the Singleton pattern or the Observer pattern. Remarkably, these design patterns are almost 30 years old, but are still in use today, proving just how well-designed and universal in usage they are.

Later in my series, we will review all 23 of those design patterns and how to implement them in your own code. We will also go over some basic areas of object-oriented programming, just in case you’re not familiar with that topic, along with inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism.

That’s all for now. I hope that in the future, you’ll master all 23 design patterns and put them to work in your own development tasks and see for yourself just how handy they can really be! Until next time!

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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend

Advanced Apex Programming
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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

October 18, 2022October 18, 2022

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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October 9, 2022October 9, 2022

Salesforce Apex Master Class (Ep. 2): How to Set Up a Free Salesforce Developer Org

Welcome to the second episode of my Salesforce Apex Master Class! Today, I’ll show you how to set up your own Salesforce developer org!

How to Set Up a Free Dev Org!

It’s easy to set up your own Salesforce developer org, even if it’s your first time using the Salesforce platform. First, you’ll visit developer.salesforce.com/signup, then fill in your information and dive right in. It’s quick and easy, but take note that with Salesforce, you’re living in “the cloud” (aka sharing space on a server with other businesses), and there are limits imposed on your orgs because of that! Limits are imposed on things like, the amount of data you can store in your org or the number of queries you can do in your org in a single execution context.

In your developer org, those numbers tend to be pretty low compared to what you’d experience when using regular organizations. I’ve found some ways to bypass those limits, such as with “big objects”, but I probably should not suggest them as they certainly aren’t “best practice” and I’m not sure Salesforce would condone them!

One note when signing up for Salesforce: if you’ve ever created a Salesforce org or if you’ve been placed in a Salesforce org before, and you used your email address as a username in those orgs anywhere at all, you can’t reuse that email address (usernames must be unique across ALL instances of Salesforce in existence, not just your own org). Instead, you’ll make up something new, or a least revise your email address when using it as a username. Such as adding a few letters or numbers at the end.

Once all that’s done, you’ll receive an email that will inform you that your Salesforce org has been created for you! It’ll take a few minutes to get that email, though, so be patient. Next up, you’ll verify your new account via that email you just received. You’ll click “Verify my account” and set up your password. Once all that’s done, you’ll be looking at your very own Salesforce org, and you’re ready for work! It’s quick, easy, and doesn’t cost you a dime.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and happy coding!

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October 9, 2022October 9, 2022

Salesforce Apex Master Class (Ep.1): What to Expect to Do as a Salesforce Developer

What is Salesforce?

You may have heard of Salesforce before, and that developers on this platform get paid good money, but what exactly is Salesforce, anyway? No matter how much you earn, your work will suffer unless you actually enjoy what you’re doing. So before you dive into this career, let’s discover what Salesforce is and what you can expect to do as a developer on the platform!

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, a vital tool for marketing sales, commerce, service, and IT teams to work in unison and be of service to their customers anywhere and everywhere. As of this writing, Salesforce stands as the #1 CRM platform available, overtaking competing platforms such as Siebel, Oracle, and SAP, among others. For context, CRM’s market share in 2015 was 19.7%, and as of today, it rose only slightly to 19.8%, with minor fluctuations. Meaning, CRM and Salesforce are probably going to remain steady for the foreseeable future, though there’s no guarantee of that. If you’re entering the Salesforce Ecosystem just because it’s the #1 CRM platform, don’t bank on that, even though it hasn’t for awhile, it could shift at any time. At one point (not long ago) Siebel was the #1 CRM platform, now you rarely hear of them.

That said, whether or not Salesforce stays at #1, it’s an outstanding platform that can do you a lot of good, and if you know your stuff, it could pay off handsomely. Now let’s go into more detail.

What You Will Likely Build as an SF Dev

As mentioned above, you’ll most likely use Salesforce for work in IT, marketing sales, commerce, services (such as help desk services), and a few others. IT, marketing sales, commerce, and services are probably going to be the central core of your work, with a few exceptions, so those are a good starting point for your use of Salesforce. Personally, I worked on 50 projects for 20 different clients using Salesforce, nearly all of them involving IT, marketing sales, commerce, and services.

So, what can you expect to build? You could build configuration point-and-click administration stuff and custom development in those areas described above, for example. I built extremely customized sales cloud instances and very large custom marketing applications that can sit on top of Salesforce or to be within a particular organization’s instance, just to name two examples.

Your overall goal: to take a client’s older or underperforming platform and upgrade it with Salesforce. This work can be done pretty quickly, too, and Salesforce’s brand prides itself on that fact. Once your work is done, any team working in IT, marketing sales, commerce, and services can coordinate their work and do it faster, more easily, and with better analytics with their daily work.

With that in mind, you might expect to move into Salesforce pretty quickly for two reasons: one, because of Salesforce’s reputation for speed, and two, because Salesforce offers a huge shell for making it easy for devs to get their work done faster than ever. Along the way, you’ll also want to understand Salesforce’s administrative side, through which you will build database tables, and set up anything else you’d have to develop on your own. When you use Salesforce, a lot of the work is already done for you.

In short, it’s incredibly important for you to get a handle on all this admin work with Salesforce. Some might disagree, which is fine, but having worked as a Java and PHP developer myself, Salesforce’s admin features can cut out a lot of clutter for developer work so I can focus on what matters most: writing code. I greatly enjoy Salesforce’s streamlined feel for my development work, and it was an easy and enjoyable transition to this platform while cutting out time-consuming remedial work. Perhaps the same will be true for you, too!

De-Mystifying Some SF Dev Misconceptions

You might have heard some misconceptions online about Salesforce, such as people saying that you don’t have to write much code with Salesforce, or that outdated languages are being used with it, or that there are few customization options with this platform, among other issues. Those were somewhat true in the past (and still a bit true today), but Salesforce is stronger and more effective than these rumors would suggest. Let’s review.

Salesforce didn’t have much IDE support early on (I have a separate video on the topic), but fortunately, IDE support is everywhere today. Meanwhile, maybe you’ve heard that you can’t do source-driven development in Salesforce, which would be a serious issue. Good news: you absolutely can use source-driven development with Salesforce, such as with scratch orgs, if a developer wants to.

As for outdated programming languages: yes, you’ll use the slightly dated language Apex, which can be compared to what Java was like 6-7 years ago. But don’t let that discourage you! No matter its age, Apex provides nearly everything you need for work in Salesforce, just lacking a few of the most advanced capabilities of coding languages. If that’s ever a concern for you, try using open source repos to fill in the gaps.

Another rumor says that with Salesforce, you can’t work with modern front-end technologies. Up until two years ago, that was true, but with today’s lightning web components, you can pretty much perform whatever modern UI front-end development you need.

The only caveat to working with Lightning Web Component’s within Salesforce is lightning locker service, among a few other issues. Locker Service, which is due for an update soon which might render this sentence incorrect, makes it challenging to use outside JavaScript Libraries. Many JS Libraries that you could easily import into a Node JS project (or equivalent) would require you to re-write some of its code (or a lot of its code) just to get it to function inside of an LWC due to Locker Service restrictions.

Typescript also won’t work out very well in Salesforce, for example, being hampered by a variety of problems. While it can be done there is just so much out-of-the-box Salesforce stuff that it won’t cooperate with that it renders it fairly useless.

As a developer, you’ll have endless options with Salesforce, and I myself have made hundreds of custom applications with Salesforce. You’ll simply have to keep those limitations in mind and plan accordingly. Once in a while, for example, you might build an application elsewhere, such as with AWS, then pipe it into Salesforce. Anything you can’t make in Salesforce, you can just slot right in.

On a final note, some folks might think that anyone who’s using Salesforce is mostly an admin, just doing point-and-click stuff instead of coding. This is simply not true, as a developer on the platform you’ll be expected to do development every single day. I’ve been a developer on the Salesforce platform for the past seven years, I’ve done development work every single day. Coding comes first and foremost with Salesforce as a developer on the platform, I can assure you, and it’s simply a pleasure for any developer like me to use.

Salesforce, in short, isn’t for everyone, but for the right developers, it’s a dream come true. Give it a try, and see what you can create! Until next time!

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September 8, 2020January 20, 2021

Salesforce Development: How to Setup Illuminated Cloud 2 with the IntelliJ IDE

What is an IDE?

IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. Its primary purpose is to make your life as a developer considerably easier by doing things like:

1) Syntax Highlighting
2) Auto-completing functions names, field names, object names, etc.
3) Integrating git easily
4) Improving debugging functionality
5) Putting your command line in the same place you develop.
6) Tons and tons of other things

It is well worth your time to invest an hour or two to figure out how to use an IDE to improve your productivity as a developer.

More info on the IntelliJ IDE here

The Salesforce IDE’s

Back when I started developing on this platform the only IDE’s we had was the Force.com IDE in Eclipse and the Dev Console… if you really count it. Today there are five IDE’s to choose from and I’m gonna walk you through how to install and configure my personal favorite, Illuminated Cloud 2.

Before I get started here are a list of your IDE options and their prices:

1) IntelliJ (Illuminated Cloud 2) – $90 a year
2) Visual Studio Code (SF Plugins) – Free
3) Welkins Suite (Pure SF IDE) – $150 a year
4) Eclipse (Retired Force.com IDE) – Free
5) Dev Console – Free

I struck out the last two because you really shouldn’t ever use them even though they are technically available options.

I have tried out all of them and my preference is IntelliJ/Illuminated Cloud 2 and that’s because between the incredible power of the widely used and extremely popular IntelliJ IDE and the impeccable work Scott Wells has put into Illuminated Cloud 2 to help it leverage all of those IntelliJ features for SF development, it’s borderline impossible to top it. It is the most point and click/easy to use of them all and it does not suffer because of it.

How to Setup IntelliJ and Illuminated Cloud 2

Here are the steps necessary to setup and be able to use Illuminated Cloud 2 for Salesforce development in IntelliJ.

1) Install the most recent JDK

2) Install the most recent version of IntelliJ Community Edition (or Ultimate if you want to pay for the advanced features)

3) After the JDK and IntelliJ have been installed, open IntelliJ and go to File -> Settings -> Plugins, click the Marketplace tab at the top and search for Illuminated Cloud

Illuminated Cloud 2 Plugin IntelliJ

4) Click the install button to install Illuminated Cloud 2 (Do not install the original Illuminated Cloud option, it is outdated).

5) After Illuminated Cloud is done installing and IntelliJ restarts, start creating a new IntelliJ project. File -> New -> Project -> Illuminated Cloud.

IlluminatedCloudProject

6) Click the “New Connection” button in the top right (the pencil icon). It will pop-up a new Connections modal. In that new modal click the “Create Connection” icon in the top left (the plug icon).
IlluminatedCloudConnections

7) Enter the information it requests: Organization type, username, password, security token (if you don’t know what the security token is my video above explains where to find it in SF) and then click the “OK” button in the bottom right.

8) If you entered in the right connection information it will give you a confirmation message that your information was valid and it will connect to your org and give you a preview of the metadata you can pull from your org.
IlluminatedCloudMetadataPreview

9) Check the checkboxes next to the metadata you would like to pull for your org and then hit the next button.

10) After hitting the next button, name your project and module whatever you’d like to name them and then click the “Finish” button!

11) That’s it you did it! You can do SF dev work in IntelliJ!

Useful Illuminated Cloud 2/IntelliJ Hotkeys

There are a ton of useful hotkeys for both IntelliJ and Illuminated Cloud 2. You can find all the Illuminated Cloud 2 hotkeys here and all of the IntelliJ hotkeys here.

Here is my shortened list of hotkeys I use every single day:

1) Reformat Code: Crtl + Shift + L
2) Get more information about a method, object, field, etc: Ctrl + Q
3) Search your entire project: Ctrl + Shift + F
4) Go to external SF Documentation: Shift + F1
5) Go to highlighted Apex Class: Ctrl + N
6) Go to highlighted component: Ctrl + Shift + N

There are tons and tons more that are super useful, so be sure to check them all out!

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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend

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Mastering Salesforce DevOps

September 5, 2020January 20, 2021

Salesforce Development: Creating a Self-Scheduling Apex Class

Why This Is Useful

Have you ever wondered, “How do I effectively schedule an apex class to run every single minute of the day?” or maybe every hour or second (please don’t schedule anything every second, lol). Well there’s a great way to do it, by having your scheduled apex class reschedule itself! This method also significantly cuts down on the jobs you have to cancel to actually make any updates to your scheduled class as well. Say for instance you did schedule the class to run once a minute. That equates to 1440 scheduled jobs!! That’s a nightmare… with this method, you’ll only have one scheduled job but it will still run every minute of the day. Yay!

So let’s just get down to it… how does this magic work? It’s actually pretty simple. In your scheduled class you just find your currently running scheduled job, abort it and then reschedule it! Let’s check out the code below or on Github.

The Code

/**
 * @description An example of a continually rescheduling job.
 * @author Matt Gerry
 * @date 9/5/2020
 */

public with sharing class Repeating_Scheduler_Example implements Schedulable
{
	private final String JOB_NAME = 'Repeating Job';
	private final Integer ONE_MINUTE = 1;

	/**
    * @description The execute method fires each time the scheduler is run. Unless there is a
     constructor, this is always the first method to fire.
    * @param cont Schedulable context instantiated by the Schedulable implementation
    * @example System.schedule(JOB_NAME, cronExpression, new Repeating_Scheduler_Example());
    */
	public void execute(SchedulableContext cont)
	{
		new Repeating_Scheduler_Case_Insert().insertCase();
		findAndAbortJob(cont);
	}

	/**
	* @description Aborts the existing scheduled job. Then calls rescheduleJob to 
          reschedule this job.
	* @param cont Schedulable context instantiated by the Schedulable implementation
	* @example finaAndAbortJob(cont);
	*/
	private void findAndAbortJob(SchedulableContext cont)
	{
		if (cont == null)
		{
			return;
		}

		//Need to query CronJobDetail to find our currently active scheduled job
		List<CronJobDetail> cronDetail = [SELECT Id FROM CronJobDetail WHERE Name= 
                :JOB_NAME LIMIT 1];

		if (cronDetail.isEmpty())
		{
			return;
		}

		//Need to find the corresponding cron trigger to be able to abort the 
                //scheduled job
		List<CronTrigger> cronTriggers = [SELECT Id FROM CronTrigger WHERE 
                CronJobDetailId = :cronDetail[0].Id];

		if(cronTriggers.isEmpty())
		{
			return;
		}

		try
		{
			//Aborts the job current setup for this scheduled class
			System.abortJob(cronTriggers[0].Id);
			rescheduleJob();
		}
		catch (Exception e)
		{
			System.debug('This was the error ::: ' + e.getMessage());
		}
	}

	/**
	* @description Reschedules this job for one minute in the future.
	* @example rescheduleJob();
	*/
	private void rescheduleJob()
	{
		Datetime sysTime = System.now().addMinutes(ONE_MINUTE);
		String cronExpression = '' + sysTime.second() + ' ' + sysTime.minute() + ' ' + 
                sysTime.hour() + ' ' + sysTime.day() + ' ' + sysTime.month() + ' ? ' + 
                sysTime.year();
		System.schedule(JOB_NAME, cronExpression, new Repeating_Scheduler_Example());
	}
}

Aborting The Job

So as you can see from the above code, all we need to do is take the name of the job and query the CronJobDetail object to find the corresponding Cron Job for our scheduled apex and then we query the CronTrigger object to get that id so we can abort our scheduled apex’s next run. After getting the CronTrigger record Id we then utilize the System.abort method to abort our scheduled apex so that we can reschedule it.

Rescheduling The Job

After we abort the job we simply utilize the System.Schedule method to reschedule our class for a time in the future. In this code we just set it to one minute in the future via a variable, but I would suggest utilizing a custom metadata type to do this as it gives you the most flexibility.

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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend

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Mastering Salesforce DevOps

When Should You Learn About Design Patterns?

What Are Design Patterns?

Which Design Patterns Should You Learn?

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What is an IDE?

Demoing the Benefits of Using an IDE

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How to Set Up a Free Dev Org!

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What is Salesforce?

What You Will Likely Build as an SF Dev

De-Mystifying Some SF Dev Misconceptions

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