SF Monk

Hello Trailblazers, Though Salesforce provides wide variety of out of the functionalities, in house solutions – creating a zip file or unzipping it in apex is still something that is not provided by Salesforce. For one of my work I came across situation where I wanted to zip multiple files together and I couldn’t find anything through Salesforce documentations. After spending some time over internet, I came across few workarounds which can be used to create zip files in Salesforce.  Listing down three of them for three different platform solutions. Zippex Utility This is Apex based utility which can help you to zip files along with other useful operations. This utility code developed by Pedro Dal Col & Pliny Smith is available on GitHub and you can deploy it’s components directly to you org as well. As per me this utility is very much powerful as it provides unzip feature as well. You can have folder structure as well or you can club multiple individual files as well using Zi...

Hello Trailblazers,  In this blog we are going to focus on OAuth 2.0 JWT Bearer Flow for Server-to-Server Integration. JWT Bearer Flow is used for server to server communication and to avoid logging in each time.  JWT Bearer Token is something that you provide to some other service to let that service authenticate you. This flow uses a certificate to sign the JWT request and doesn’t require explicit user interaction. However, this flow does require prior approval of the client app. Which means you need to allow access first for the connected app by using some third-party authorization app. So, we can consider JWT as a key which gives us access to various things. Pre-requisites for JWT(JSON Web Token) Bearer Flow X509 certificate Connected App X509 certificate  Since we will be signing JWT using RSA SHA256, we need certificate as a secret for signing data. You can download certificate from Salesforce or you can use openssl for ge...

  Hello Trailblazers,   Today I am going to discuss about one functionality of Salesforce that everyone knows but still very few use it in correct way. We have been using Custom Settings for storing static values for global use and avoid hard coding, but I believe most of us use List type Custom Settings only. I am going to explain Hierarchy Custom setting and it’s actual/appropriate use in this blog. So first let us quickly understand what custom settings are – Custom Settings are just like Custom Objects in Salesforce which enable us to create custom sets of data that can be accessed in formula fields, validation rules, apex, flows & SOAP API without consuming an extra query for retrieval. There are two types of custom settings: List & Hierarchy. What is Hierarchy Custom Setting? Hierarchy Custom Settings does the same job done by List Custom Settings but with an additional power of managing data as per built-in hierarchical logic that let’s you decide what dat...

Hello Trailblazers, In this article we will discuss about the platform events. This covers basic idea of Platform Events, how platform events work, how to use Platform Events and some considerations for using Platform Events. Salesforce Platform Events follow Event Driven Architecture. So what is event driven architecture? In simple words, whenever any kind of action happens you notify someone with some message, and we call that action as an Event , message that it carries is known as Event Message , someone who is going to receive that message is known as Event Consumer , environment where action has happened is Event Producer and common channel through which Producer sends an event and receiver reads message is known as Event Bus . This is completely different from request-response structure, your system/application just have to subscribe to event channel and they will be notified in real-time whenever event occurs. Receivers are always in listening mode and more than one receive...

Visual Studio Code is the latest IDE for Salesforce Development and believe me it has eased developer’s life by providing rich functionalities. This post will help you to setup VS code editor for Salesforce development.  Downloads : 1.        Visual Studio Code 2.        Salesforce CLI Installing VS Code Editor To download Visual Studio Code navigate to link given above. From download page select your operating system and proceed to download. I will suggest you to download most stable version of VS Code Editor. Once download is complete, install it in the system. Once installation is complete, you’ll see below welcome screen. While installing make sure to select Add To PATH option. Now let’s go ahead and download Salesforce CLI.   Installing Salesforce CLI Salesforce CLI is a command line interface that simplifies development and build automation.  VS Code ...

Hope you have read Part I of this series !! In this part we'll understand how to read log file. Once you capture a log file and open it, you can get all information from first line itself. First line of log gives information about the log categories and levels and   Second line gives User Information EXECUTION_STARTED marks the start of transaction. CODE_UNIT_STARTED and CODE_UNIIT_FINISHED marks start and end of particular code unit which was executed during transaction. Using this you can check what has happened when particular unit of code executed. Units of code include, but are not limited to, the following: Triggers Workflow invocations and time-based workflow Validation rules Approval processes Apex lead convert @future method invocations Web service invocations executeAnonymous calls Visualforce property accesses on Apex controllers Visualforce actions on Apex controllers Execution of the batch Apex start and finish methods, and each ex...

If you are ready to accept that your code can run into error, then debug logs can help you to find out the victim. Debug logs give all required information of a transaction to find out what is exactly happening when you perform any kind of action in Salesforce which includes database operation, system processes.You can set debug logs for users, classes and triggers. Before moving ahead with how to capture debug logs, let’s understand few related terms which we will use while setting debug logs :  When monitoring debug logs you can specify what you want track or capture in that file. For this Log Category and Log Level helps. Log Category :    With this you can mention what type of information you want to be logged, such as whether you want to get information about Apex or DML operations etc.            Below are the different log categories –         Category Description Database This gi...