Show your hard earned badges by adding Trailhead Widget on your Website or Blog
Here it comes, Christmas goodies for Trailhead lovers. If you own WordPress, blogspot or any website, use this Trailhead widget to show and brag about all your badges. Badges, which you have earned by completing challenges on sleepless nights, on airport, during commute or over the weekends. What could be the best way to show Trailhead profile summary other than widget?
Will it impact performance of my website
All computations are done outside of your website and Javascript execution is asynchronous, which will make sure website rendering is not blocked by this widget.
How to use it
Step 1
Identify the URL of your Trailhead profile. Make sure you are not copying URL of success community. Below image shows steps to get Trailhead URL. We just need end part of URL, after last forward slash.Continue reading “Trailhead Widget for your Website”
Definitions of Data warehouse, Data lake, Data Mart, Operational Data Store
Data Warehouse
Data warehouse is also known as Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Data warehouse is used as source for Business Intelligent’s reporting and analysis. Data Warehouse system collects data from multiple sources and contains historical data for trend analysis reporting. ETL tool is used mostly to build Data Warehouse and interfaces around it. Data Warehouse acts as Single Version of truth.
Data warehouse overview (From Wikipedia)
2. Operational Data Store (ODS)
Operational Data Store is frequently confused and definition is overlapped with Data Warehouse. Some of my clients had used word ODS instead of Data Warehouse, which got me confused on number of occasion. As per my understanding & research, ODS is used to integrate data from multiple systems and feed it to Data Warehouse. Data Warehouse consist of complete history of data, whereas ODS contains latest or recent data (short window of data). Data load frequency in ODS is mostly hourly whereas data load frequency in Data Warehouse mostly is nightly because of data volume. Most important reason to have ODS in your company is ability to run report realtime, where source system does not have required reporting capabilities.
3. Data Mart
Data warehouse can contain many Data Marts. Mostly Data mart is created per business line or system that needs data from Data Warehouse. Indirectly we can say, Data Mart is access layer used to get data out of Data Warehouse by other systems.
4. Data Lake
Term Data Lake was coined by James Dixon, CTO of Pentaho to compare with Data Mart. As per James, Data Mart have several problems mostly related to data silos. Data Lake is method of storing data from sources in its actual or raw format that could be Relational Data, XML, flat files or even binary files. Other tools like ETL, access Data Lake as per need for reporting or analysis purposes.
Thrilling story of Salesforce Technical Architect on a quest to solve application problems and avoid governor limit errors
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Ha ha ha joking.. its combination of many real stories of my previous projects and few readers might be from my team itself 😉 . Leave comment my brave team mates if you are able to co-relate !!!
I tried to summaries as much as possibilities about governor limit errors and way to get out of it. Most of scenario described below may not be the first choice of Technical Architects however because of many reasons like budget, resource skill, tools available and compliance, bad decision could be taken which causes ripple effect on Salesforce scalibility.
Before start, I would encourage readers to leave comment on post and let everyone know in this suspenseful story, did you catch governor limits and Solution already before its exposed ? In this blog post, answers are mostly in invisible/white font which would not be seen until you highlight it. Its for few readers who don’t want spoilers.
Using Salesforce DX to Export and Import records into regular Salesforce Instances without dependency on developer hub org
In today’s continuous integrationsolution built for Salesforce, if you need to load sample data into Salesforce then either we use command line dataloader or custom tool built to import export records.
We don’t need Developer Hub or Scratch Orgs to use Salesforce DX for import and export. In this blog post, I have used my regular developer org for demo.
How to use SalesforceDX to deploy metadata in Sandboxes or Non-Scratch Salesforce instances
If you have existing VCS which stores metadata information about your Salesforce instance in old format, dependent on package.xml and you want to use Salesforce DXthen this blog post is for you. As you might already know, Salesforce DX does not need package.xml and can automatically detect changes in your Salesforce instance, therefore new Salesforce DX project format is different. In this blog post we will see, how Salesforce DX can be used without enabling Developer Hub and using Salesforce DX with normal Salesforce instances.
There are two solution to this problem
Keep using old Project format and use Metadata API to retrieve and deploy
Convert old project format to Salesforce DX project Format
Difference between Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment
I have written many posts about Continuous Integrations and implemented many projects with capability of Continuous Delivery. However multiple times got into discussion on what exactly is difference between Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. As SFDX is new way to develop and deploy changes in Salesforce, just thought to post a small post on basic difference between these terms.
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is automated build scripts to detect changes in Source Code Management (SCM) like Git. Once the change is detected, source code would be deployed to common dedicated build server (Sandbox) to make sure build is not failing and all test classes and integration tests are running fine. Continue reading “Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment”
Display chevron control or breadcrumb in Flow to show Salesforce flow screen navigation progress
Have your end user complained or wanted some more coolness from Flow ? Do they want to have a nice clickable graphical presentation at top of page showing their progress or page number ? Recently, I was having a discussion with my colleague on same requirement. User should be able to jump between pages and at the same time, pictorial status should be displayed. Can we do it in Flow ? Can we create a chevron control or breadcrumbs in Salesforce Flow. Answer is yes.
Video tutorial and Complete source code to use Salesforce JWT OAuth to authenticate Nodejs Application
JWT OAuth uses digital signature to authenticate external application with Salesforce. JWT can be used to request an OAuth access token from Salesforce when a client wants to use a previous authorization.
We need to make sure this connected app is already pre – approved either by using WebServer, User Agent or any other flow. You can find this step in video recorded.
Next we need to send JWT request to token URL – https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token
If JWT request is valid then Salesforce returns access_token , which can be used in subsequent requests to perform allowed operations in Salesforce via Nodejs application.
My favorite Salesforce Winter 18 features about Lightning, Flow, Platform Event , Shield and Salesforce DX
There are many cool features features in Winter 18, however I would be listing only my favorite top picks from 589 pages of release notes. Would suggest to through this post to understand Sandbox readiness dates for Winter 18.
Lightning Base components are out of the box component created with Salesforce Lightning Design System CSS. If there are no Lightning Base components, You would need to use aura or HTML components and write custom CSS to make look and feel similar to Lightning Experience. Base component starts with lightning: namespace. There are many new Base components introduced like lightning:datatable , lightning:checkboxGroup , lightning:dualListbox , lightning:progressIndicator , lightning:progressBar, lightning:slider. Recently only I blogged about Read only Chevron Component with mountains of code. Even though we are using this component for last 6 months however If my project could have waited, then all I had to use is 5-6 lines of code using lightning:progressIndicator.
2. Component Library (Beta)
We can already see all standard and custom component information using https://<myDomain>.lightning.force.com/auradocs URL. However, as part of Winter 18 release, Salesforce came up with revamped website just like Lightning Design System to show code snippets on how to use Lightning Components. You can navigate to Component Library using https://<myDomain>.lightning.force.com/componentReference/suite.app URL.
Use Apex code to auto assign Accounts on basis of Enterprise Territory Assignment rules
Using Territory Management in Salesforce,we can auto assign territories to Account and give access to users working in common region. When we create Account, Territory Assignment rules automatically runs. On Account update we have a checkbox on page layout allowing to run Territory rules. However, Lightning experience does not support Territory Assignment checkbox yet on page layouts.
Unfortunately, Apex also does not support Account Assignment using Territory rules. Only way left is to use Salesforce API. Question is, just to run Enterprise Territory Management rules, should we import WSDL and convert it to respective Apex classes ? There must be some better way.
