Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I

After more than 5 years of fiddling around with Apex classes and Visualforce components and focusing on general coding principles, I thought it might be good to learn some of broader Salesforce features that could be easily overlooked by developers. So I took this exam over the weekend: Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I. It was a happy result: PASS. It did not tell me what score I achieved though. Here I just want to list some “new features/points” I discovered during the prep time the week before the exam. Some of these features have existed for years. It is just that I never paid attention to them.

• Schema Builder. I cannot remember how many times I opened different browser tabs for different SObject definition pages to find relevant fields’ API names, types, picklist values and lookup relationship to other objects. This Schema builder, jut at Setup | App Setup | Schema Builder, is such a powerful tool to do all of those in one place. Moreover, you can add, edit and delete fields and objects by simple drag-and-drops; not to mention there is a “quick find” box to search for things. When customers want the schema of your product’s data model, just mention this to them. Trailhead is at here.
• Contacts to Multiple Accounts. The Account lookup on Contact usually means the company the contact is most closely associated with. But contacts might work with more than one company. A business owner might own more than one company or a consultant might work on behalf of multiple organizations. Any other accounts associated with the contact represent indirect relationships. The Related Contacts list lets you view current and past relationships. The Salesforce object is AccountContactRole.
• Quick Deployment. This is a deployment mechanism that rolls out your customizations to production faster by running tests as part of validations and skipping tests in your deployments. This is also useful to prepare a deployment simulation to production before the real deployment happens. Both change set and Ant target for meta data migration support quick deployments. Trailhead is at here.
• Change Set. I have known the concept for quite a while but have not used it until a recent customer deployment management chance. Have to say it is a tedious work – clicking buttons hundreds of times trying to add relevant components to the deployment. It is only agile when used together with quick deployment and when it deploys relatively small amount of work. It tracks all deployment histories.
• Enforce CRUD and FLS. I had known that when rendering VisualForce pages, the platform will automatically enforce CRUD and FLS when the developer references SObjects and SObject fields directly in the VisualForce page. However, I have always forgotten to enforce the CRUD and field level security when Visualforce pages are referencing simple string properties that indirectly relate to some SObject fields. Expressions like these should be used more often in this case:

  Schema.sObjectType.Contact.fields.Phone.isAccessible()
  Schema.sObjectType.Contact.fields.Name.isUpdateable()
  

• Process Builder. A few of the favorite questions the exam asked were about problem solving options. i.e. if we should use Salesforce declarative process automation features or Apex/Trigger code. Apart from formula fields and workflow rules, Salesforce have this strong declarative process automation feature – process builder. It can easily build a wizard by using this tool.
• Triggers and order of execution. The developer guide is at here. The exam had more than a couple of questions in this area. It is important to remember when before trigger and after trigger get executed. And when there is any workflow rule being involved that can potentially update the same record so to recursively fire the triggers, this is the guide to understand the detail steps of the process.
• Test Suite. If multiple test classes are selected in the “New Run” from the developer console, they are running concurrently so can sometimes hit the “Unable to unlock the row” error. The correct way is to create a suite of many tests and run the suite. The test classes in the suite are executed one by one sequentially. The suite is also useful in preparing the regression testing.
• Lightning Components. It is nice to follow the trailhead to get some hands-on experience when learning Lighting. Even though it is still at an early stage and seems to be slow at the preview start-up, it is the modern way of coding the application – single page and JavaScript MVC.
• Got to learn more standard Salesforce objects such as Opportunity and Lead. Surprisingly, Account to Opportunity is in a master-detail relationship but Account field on Opportunity is not mandatory. There were 3 questions in the exam in relation to Salesforce standard objects and their relationships.