It has been nearly 10 years back in 2014 when the first edition of my book Force.com Enterprise Architecture was first published and clearly a lot has moved on since then and not just the platform capabilities. Keeping pace with branding changes resulted in the second edition of the book being called Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture. This latest 4th edition, Salesforce Platform Enterprise Architecture has probably the most accurate and I hope enduring title! This 4th edition is also nearly twice the size of the first edition, coming in at 681 pages. So much so, its 16 chapters is no ..read more

Salesforce platform has long since had a place in my heart for the empowerment it brings to people who like to create. As a developer I love to create and feel the satisfaction in helping others. With Salesforce I can create without code as well. Now as much as I love the declarative side of building I do love to code! In 2013 I found a way to magnify this feeling by closing the gap between coding and helping other creators, also known as Admin’s. This blog talks about a big next step in the future of the Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries Tool or “Dolores” (short for DLRS) as the community ..read more

As readers of this blog will already have determined, I love API’s! So when I was approached by the team at 100 Days of Trailhead to share my Top 5 “things” my mind fell to API’s. This is a short blog post because effectively the brief was a 10 minute video! Well ok I ran a bit over in the end so its actually 15 minutes. In the video I cover 5 Apex API’s and a Bonus API at the end. Thank you for 100 Days of Trailhead for asking to contribute and please do check out all the other amazing content they have on their website! You can watch the video below (or link here) and find full source code i ..read more

As readers of this blog will already have determined, I love API’s! So when I was approached by the team at 100 Days of Trailhead to share my Top 5 “things” my mind fell to API’s. This is a short blog post because effectively the brief was a 10 minute video! Well ok I ran a bit over in the end so its actually 15 minutes. In the video I cover 5 Apex API’s and a Bonus API at the end. Thank you for 100 Days of Trailhead for asking to contribute and please do check out all the other amazing content they have on their website! You can watch the video below (or link here) and find full source code i ..read more

Boilerplate code is code that we repeat often with little or no variation. When it comes to writing field validations in Apex, especially within Apex Triggers there are a number of examples of this. Especially when it comes to checking if a field value has changed and/or querying for related records, which also requires observing good bulkifcathion best practices. This blog presents a small proof of concept framework aimed at reducing such logic made possible in Winter’21 with a small but critical enhancement to the Apex runtime that allows developers to dynamically add field errors. Additiona ..read more

I typically do not blog about each new release of this tool, but since its been awhile and there is some key features in this release I thought I would add to the usual release notes.  If you are not aware this is a community driven tool that helps address a current platform limitation around rollup summaries. Specifically the inability to do rollup summaries between lookup relationships. This is possible between master detail relationships using the declarative mode of Lightning Platform, but not between Lookup Relationships. The tool is open sourced and supported by an amazing community ..read more

When it comes to implementing asynchronous workloads in Apex developers have a number of options such as Batch Apex and Queueable, each can be driven by user or system driven actions. This blog focuses on some of the more advanced aspects of implementing async workloads using Platform Events and Apex. In comparison to other approaches, implementing asynchronous workloads using Platform Events offers two unique features. The first helps you better dynamically calibrate and manage resources based on data volumes to stay within limits, while the second feature provides automatic retry capabilitie ..read more

We rarely get the luxury these days of knowing everything up front when designing and implementing software, as they say, “it is about the journey not the destination”. And so it is with some business requirements, they can appear well known at first but can often change, and designing ahead in order to embrace this inevitability is what this blog is about. It is also true that a good journey is also best experienced with others working together pooling their respective skills, succeeding and learning together. This blog focuses on how to use several platform features such as Apex Invocable Me ..read more

I’m proud to announce the third edition of my book has now been released. Back in March this year I took the plunge start updates to many key areas and add two brand new chapters. Between the 2 years and 8 months since the last edition there has been several platform releases and an increasing number of new features and innovations that made this the biggest update ever! This edition also embraces the platforms rebranding to Lightning, hence the book is now entitled Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture. You can purchase this book direct from Packt or of course from Amazon ..read more

Getting your users attention is not always easy, choosing how, when and where to notify them is critical. Ever since Lightning Experience and Salesforce Mobile came out the notification bell has been a one stop shop for Chatter and Approval notifications, regardless if you are on your desktop or your mobile device. In beta release at time of writing is a new platform feature known as Notification Manager that allows you to send your own custom notifications to your users for anything your heart desires from the very same locations, even on a users mobile device! This blog dives into this featu ..read more