Salesforce coding lessons for the 99%Finally, Apex tutorials for point-and-click admins! Written by a self-taught Google engineer.
Salesforce coding lessons for the 99%
Ah, the toughest question of our generation! Which tool are you supposed to choose?
You’ve all heard the Golden Rule of Salesforce: “Use the simplest tool for the job!”
…but does that really apply in today’s era of Lightning?
…should every org follow the Golden Rule, or are there exceptions?
I argue that the Golden Rule is NOT so golden nowadays!
A strong Salesforce professional will recommend the best tool for each specific scenario.
For example:
To learn more, check out my latest talk: Clicks vs Code: Which Tool Should You Choose?
Sneak Preview:
Full Presentation:
Hope you enjoy!
David
P.S. shoutout to Tahoe Dreamin’ for letting me present this! See ya’ll there next year!
With all of the updates to Flow over the last couple of years, I’m curious if you have any updated visuals. I’d be particularly interested to see your assessment of Flow vs Apex given all of the recent updates.
Flow is a lot better now! At the same time, orgs are getting more ambitious with what they want in Salesforce!
So, David – would you say that flows also increased in Speed?
They gained tons of functionality, but I have not been able to measure any increase in speed so far.
Hi David,
I went through your Apex Academy on Pluralsight and I think I got it there perfectly.
Due to some restrictions in our company, I won`t get to coding so Flowbuilder is maximum.
I am doing some Trail on this but everything is just a fog for me. I see the Apex behind, but it`s like behind the thick cloth
Could you, please, help me find some resource which would put me onto right track and understand the Flowbuilder with help of basic Apex knowledge. Everything I found is explained upwards , no coding required etc.
I know, I am a wierdo , but somehow, the coding is easier for me to understand than lots of fancy graphics , resources and connectors.
Very interesting! Yes actually in many ways coding is easier to read as it’s all in front of you, rather than hidden in the flow UI. And yes coding is a universal language where flow is not. Personally don’t know too much about flow courses but I would recommend searching for Jen Lee’s and Automation Champion’s website
any change of the 2020 version
Would love to see the graphic updated to match recent releases! IE better flow debugging.
Love the visuals so much! Curious if you will continue to update this as the products evolve. For example I see a bright future with Flows that would make it much more adoptable and yet still quite powerful.
Love the diagrams. One vector you may want to consider is “Rigidity”, i.e. how does each tool cope with re-naming or re-labelling fields. In this case Process Builder scores about minus 375…
Just wondering…..I want to prevent a user from saving a record under complex conditions that a validation rule cannot do. I could write a FLOW that would analyze the data and determine if the save can proceed or not….but as I understand FLOW, if triggered by a field update, the FLOW cannot interact with the user….in other words, the field update would be done by the user and then the FLOW would run.
Is there any way to have a FLOW prevent a record save?
All help appreciated!
Hey Chris! I realize this is almost a year later but can you have the flow check a box if the decision criteria is met and just have a validation rule on that checkbox where it can’t be checked?
Great article David, this is a great resource to show clients when they form the immediate opinion that Flow/ProcessBuilder is good, Apex is bad.
There’s a place and time for each.
Testability remains one of the major drawbacks of the declarative side of the house.
Stephen – Agreed. For testability declarative test automation tools like Provar are there to fill the gap and bridge both. While not everyone can afford paid tools, it’s much cheaper than employing developers to create code.
There are also free tools to undertake some UI testing which kinda work if you only want to run them in a single environment.
Declaration: I am a Provar employee.
Hey David-
This is a great presentation/powerpoint. This is one of the most important discussions of post-Lightning Salesforce. I especially love the radar charts at the end.
Thank you!
David, any easy way we can know which flow is invoking Apex ?
Not that I know of!
Good Presentation. Thanks David.
Process builder and Flow Builder have edge when we go for Large Volume data. We usually Deactivate all workflows and validation rules before Large Volume data insert or update to get better performance.
With Lightening , we can deactivating only limited number of Process builder or Flow builder for LVD . We don’t miss anything to deactivate.
Interesting read and a good summary, not sure I agree with some of your scoring however, for example Workflows often cause production errors, I’m sure we’ve all seen the dreaded ‘invalid cross reference id’ because a workflow is assigning a lookup a record value not visible to the running user!
I would also say Workflows are slower than PB too, in that when you have multiple workflows on the same object then a single PB process is much faster. I’ve seen benefits in live orgs where Opportunity Save has been reduced from 7 seconds down to 3 by optimising 25 workflows into 2 processes with multiple evaluation criteria. You’re clearly correct when it comes to a single criteria though, in both speed to implement and execute.
I’d also argue (as someone who works for Provar – the Salesforce Test Automation tool) that the declarative tools are just as testable as code, albeit requiring a product such as ours. As Provar is a no-code solution this levels the playing field for testing business logic irrespective of the solution used to implement it.
This is wonderful! Thank you :)
Hi David,
Thank you for sharing this great presentation. I do have a question about the limits category. Next to PB and flows, what do you mean when you say ‘Apex limits, without Apex control’?
I’m running into some errors with a new process builder and believe it might be related to a trigger. Could you further explain?
Thanks for all the support!
Thanks!
PB and Flow run on the same engine as Apex, so they can hit the dreaded “101 SOQL query” error just as easily!
Unlike Apex, you can’t really optimize your PB/Flow to get around this though unfortunately!
Your error could very well be a combination of PB limitations and/or unoptimized code!
Perfect, that makes sense. Thanks for your help as always!
Hey David,
I think with the flow updates that have been made, and the updated flow tool coming soon, this may be something to re-evaluate. For example, self-bulkification and the ‘debug’ function.
And one quick thing to note, in the presentation you have for Flows UX: Good, but the chart shows as Bad.
Thanks for all you do for the community!
David,
IMO to some extent you can get around limits using Flow, at least moreso than process builder. In PB, you have no choice but to query any time you a value, but in flow you can pull a whole collection of records down and loop through them with decisions to see if they are what you need. 1 query vs. n queries.
You are the best.
Great Work # Well done Sir
Great article, thank you.
I have found one thing that I would like to do with a process builder.
I wanted to have a process builder that controlled when all other process builders were called (for one object), however when I called a process builder from another I lost the previous values of that object. As far as I know it is working as designed, but it would have been really nice.
Well Done #David Sir
great!
Thanks so much for your continuous good lessons!