Merry Christmas...!!

In this post I am going to talk about Salesforce DX. So, after the celebration of Christmas, let's celebrate DXmas together by learning what Salesforce DX is and how can we use it to increase our productivity.

Well, the first question that comes in your mind is What is DX in Salesforce ? 
DX stands for Developer Experience. Salesforce focuses on enhancing the developer experience through this new feature. There are some specific terms that you will hear every time you learn about Salesforce DX, whether it's during a live demo session or reading about it in a blog post like mine. Let's learn about those terms first so that we'll be aware of these whenever we'll hear about them in future.

1. Source of Truth

A source of truth is simply a source for accessing and modification of a data element. Till now we have worked on Org Based Development Model in which every data related to a project resides in an Org. So, earlier our development org was our Source of Truth but the concept of Salesforce DX focuses on the point that your VCS (Version Control System) repository in which your code resides is your source of truth. That can be a repository on Github, Bitbucket  or any other VCS that you use to prefer Salesforce supports all VCS. Salesforce DX focuses on Artifact-Based development in which we divide the whole project into different applications/features and then we develop and release each feature individually as a single artifact.

2. Artifact 

An artifact is simply a group of related code and customizations. It can be developed, tested and released independently as well. The point to be noted in that while talking about a salesforce project, the metadata components that reside in one artifact cannot reside in any other artifact at the same time. This means that we have to make relationships between artifacts if other artifact components require metadata from a different artifact. It's similar to as we make a base test class that can be used by other test classes for the creation of data.

3. Scratch Org

4. Developer Hub Org

5. Salesforce CLI

6. Extensions

Have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year 2018

PMD basically stands for Programming Mistake Detector. It is a source code analyzer that finds common mistakes in your code like:- unused variables, if-else statements without braces, naming conventions of methods, soql in loops and many more. It also includes CPD which stands for Copy/Paste Detector which finds duplicate code in your files and make you aware so that you can improve to make your code reusable.

You can download the latest version of PMD as a zip file from the PMD Homepage by clicking the download link or you can scroll down to the downloads section and download any other version from there. Currently, the latest version is 6.0.0 which was released yesterday. You can download it directly here.

After downloading the zip file you have to extract it and it will give you two folders namely bin and lib apart from a LICENSE file. I am currently using a windows operating system so going to tell you the commands according to that. If you are using a Linux/Unix OS you can read from here and then follow the similar commands according to your OS from the getting started page.

In the bin folder, we get a number of batch files out of which - pmd.bat and cpd.bat files are the one which we'll be mainly using for using pmd. As PMD is a command line tool, so if you want to use it like from anywhere on your system, I suggest you to add pmd bin to your system path in the environment variables so that it can be accessed from anywhere on your system. That's all for setting up let's learn how to use PMD.

Now you have installed PMD and you want to analyze your code. PMD allows you to analyze code written in a number of languages like:- java, javascript, xml, apex etc. We'll mainly focus on the apex code here. So here is the general command syntax to analyze the apex class or a directory consisting of a number of classes as follows:- 

The release 6.0.0 is the latest and is a major release so even if you are already using PMD, this release consists of a number of changes that you must be aware of. Even the apex rules categorization is updated and the old rule-sets like:- Braces, Complexity is deprecated now. You can know about the latest apex rules in the current release of PMD here. The table of contents present on this page have the same name as the xml files present in the pmd library implementing the rules under that name. Below is the example command using the default rules already present in pmd library for apex. It is using the design.xml rule file under the apex category following the name of the rule that you want to check.You can run the command without any rule name to use all the rules present in that xml file.

This command is checking that in all the apex classes present in the classes folder. If there is any class which is using methods with excessive parameters. The excessive parameter rule is present in the standard library and you can view it here. So, when I run this command as I have set the format as html and the output file is named output.html, I get the file named output.html in the current directory where the command is executed as I have not given any path for output.html but you can keep a separate path for output report files.
The report created by pmd for me is an html file which looks like this:-

The report gives you the file name with path, the line number that consists of error as well as the problem which is the direct link to the original doc where the sample error code is there to which your code resemble leading to error. When I opened my test.cls then this was the code snippet giving me error:-

As you can see this method consists of a number of parameters whereas it is preffered that you use less parameters in your method. So this is how you can use pmd with some general standard rules defined in the library to check whether your code quality is good or not.

Apart from people working as a developer or admin, if you are a technical architect or even the owner of your company. Then obviously you want people working under you to write perfect code and maybe follow only a bunch of standard rules that you think are most important. Don't worry PMD has taken care of that too.

You can make your own rule file in which you can define a bunch of standard rules and then distribute it to other developers so that they must follow the standards while writing code.
You can see in the file below that I am using three common ways by which you can add rules to your rule-set file.

1. By using a single rule from a rule-set.
2. By using full rule-set present in the library.
3. By using full rule-set but excluding some of the rules from it.

During the starting of this month, I took a session on Lightning Data Service with Noida Salesforce Developer User group at Dreamforce Global Gathering 2017. I have made a presentation for the same and you can view it here and have a more clear idea about the LDS.

Lightning Data Service from Rahul Malhotra

There is one more component i.e. LDSWrapperComp in which I wrapped all the components so that I can embed all components together as a single component. The final wrapper component look as follows when you embed it in the record detail page:- 

So, here you can see, I have made four components for each of CRUD operation. What I did is I made this wrapper component reusable. But how ?? As you know that in our Lead as well as Contact both consists of first name and last name fields, so I made a single component and embedded it in both the Lead and Contact detail pages. But as you can see in the last component, I have named it as Create New Lead. This is because, when you create a new record using LDS, you have to give the SObject Type as you load the component initially and I have given my SObject Type as Lead so, in this case whether you embed it in any detail page, it'll create a Lead only.

So let's jump on to the code. You can download the whole code of this LDS demo from here.
If you want to see whole code step by step, you can clone the github repo on your system and then move step by step as I have created 4 different branches in which in each branch one extra component is added to the wrapper component.
You can switch between all 4 branches in the following order:-

1. read
2. update
3. delete
4. create

More better approach can be if you have setup MavensMate with sublime text to connect with your org, as in that case you have to just create empty components in your actual org and you can go into your org's folder and can set the remote url to my github repo and then switch to particular branch do a git pull and you have the code. But to sync the code to your dev org, you have to make the Lightning Components with same name in your org and then refresh from the server to get those components and then switch to branch and save each file. You may have to delete the .lightning file from the config folder if you are not able to sync the code on saving the file.

If you want to learn how to setup MavensMate you can refer to my other blog post How to setup MavensMate with your favorite text editor for Salesforce.

So, make sure you have tried all the crud operations of LDS by using the code given in the repo. If you have any doubts or problems you can comment below or contact me directly on my twitter handle which is - @rahulcoder

Go to https://www.sublimetext.com/ and click on download from the navigation menu at the top, it'll take you to the download page.

Download the file according to your OS and install that.

To install MavensMate, you have to go to it's github repository and in the releases, you can download any version you want to. Once you are on the releases page, you'll see something like this:- 

Click on this link:- https://github.com/joeferraro/MavensMate-Desktop/releases to go directly to the releases page and download the file according to your system. You have different extensions available like:- exe for Windows, dmg for Mac or deb for linux. Download and install it.

Once you'll open MavensMate, you will see this screen:- 

• Click on New Project.
• Select the Environment Type. It can be production, developer, sandbox, prerelease or a custom URL.
• Click on Connect Button.

• Go to Tools. Click on Command Pallete.
• If you have already Package Control installed then no problem, otherwise type package control in the command pallete and install that first.

Great...!! You have now MavensMate plugin installed for sublime text and you have configured your text editor for working with Salesforce. You must see MavensMate tab on the right side of help on the top when installed. Now you can code easily here and as you save your file it'll be automatically saved on the Salesforce as shown in the below image:- 

Be careful while using MavensMate as it may override your code on Salesforce when multiple users are working on the same org. It usually show a conflict if there is one but it's a better approach to refresh the files from server before start working. For this you can right click on the folder or file from the left side bar and go to MavensMate->Refresh from Server.

Salesforce has announced My Trailhead that will allow your company to customize the learning environment. This is not available yet but will be generally available in the 2nd half of 2018. It allows your company to create customized trailmixes for you and also track your progress, means your company can now help you improving your performance by forming a customized trailhead path just for you.

There is one more amazing feature you must have a look at.

Merge your trailhead accounts

Yes..! You can finally merge your trailhead accounts yourself. Salesforce gives you this functionality too now, just go to settings and you have the option to merge your trailhead account. Need to know more ? have a look at this article

Seize the Trail

Salesforce has given a golden opportunity to all the trailblazers. Do more and more trailheads and earn batches between Nov 13 - Dec 31' 2017 and you can be the lucky winner to earn any of these goodies depending upon your rank.You can look at the description here and if you have seen this now for the first time. Don't worry, you have still 1 month left to showcase your skills. #SeizetheTrail

So. What are you waiting for ? Go ahead and start doing trailheads now...!!