Category: Weekly Newsletter

Order management is an intricate process that ends with a moment of truth — the moment a merchant fulfills their brand promise to its customers. Once the customer clicks the buy button or checks out, order management begins to get the product shipped and delivered. 

Consider the journey that your favorite pair of jeans must take to make it to your doorstep or onto a hanger in a store nearby. An intricate series of steps and interconnected pieces must all work together to bring you that “gotcha!” moment when you finally have your denim in hand. The ordering and fulfillment process for a pair of jeans — and for millions of other products — can make or break a brand’s relationship with a customer.

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Salesforce CLI Unification — Now in Beta!

Let’s start with what CLI Unification means for deploy operations. For example, sf deploy will deploy the entire project that is defined in your local directory. If your project includes a Salesforce Function and a Force app, then both can be deployed with one command to each of their respective environments. Plus, this command walks you through the deploy process, so no need to remember all the flags. The command steps you through the process, and if this is a deploy that you do all the time, you can save that deploy configuration for the future and it will be called each time you run sf deploy.

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Let’s consider a simple example to help illustrate how one can easily hit these limits in the real world on a large-scale enterprise implementation.

Let’s imagine that a fictitious company, “Electric Motors,” wants to provide their 5m+ customer base with a live update on their support cases without requiring customers to refresh the page. The company uses Salesforce Experience Cloud to provide an online digital portal experience to its customers.

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With the General Availability of the Progressive Web App (PWA) Kit and Managed Runtime, our goal is to make any front-end development team feel immediately comfortable and excited about the storefront developer experience from day zero.

This GA ushers in a new era for Commerce Cloud, where front-end storefront development is intentionally based on modern, API-first, open-sourced web approaches.

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Apex Continuations: Implementation and Testing in Aura & LWC

Apex Continuations are a mechanism provided by the Salesforce platform that allows you to make asynchronous long-running requests to an external Web Service. The service supports callouts to a SOAP or REST Web Service, with a maximum timeout of 120 seconds (versus 10 seconds in a standard synchronous callout).

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Building from API request templates instead of going into each API’s documentation saves you a lot of time and greatly reduces the risk of errors. However, just like Workbench, the Salesforce APIs Collection doesn’t replace the documentation. You’ll need to use Postman in combination with the API’s documentation.

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The acquisition of Slack, which closed in July, opens up a brand new world for Salesforce developers to build rich, conversational apps connected to their Salesforce data and metadata. But doing this is no small task. Connecting Salesforce to Slack entails standing up middleware for managing authentication, routing requests to Salesforce, building Block Kit to represent metadata, leveraging multiple frameworks, and much more, all of which require development resources. Today, in the Dreamforce developer main show, “Innovation from Anywhere with Salesforce Developers” (at 3:30 pm PT), we’re proud to introduce an easier way to build Slack apps deeply integrated with Salesforce, codenamed “Foyer.”

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Announcing Salesforce Platform eCars Sample App

You can build and run almost any part of your business on the Salesforce Platform. You probably already know that, so instead of telling you, let’s look at a new sample application we’ve created. It’s using multiple parts of the Platform in an integrated way to improve and streamline the experience of both employees and customers for Pulsar Motors, the newest fictitious electric vehicle company.

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To make this feature happen, we teamed up with the Apex and Metadata API teams. Together we implemented a way to synchronously read and asynchronously deploy metadata. The implementation functions as if you were using the read and deploy metadata operations, but it doesn’t require a web service callout.

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In this example, we’re going to talk about components in the Gmail sidebar; however, you can always reference the outlook integration documentation for examples.

To get started, all you need to do is navigate to Salesforce Setup > Gmail Integration and Sync. From there, you can turn on the Gmail integration and switch on Customize Content with App Builder. Once this is active, you can select Create New Pane to launch an app builder for your new email application pane—this functions just like the App Builder you know and love. It allows you to bring in standard and custom components, as well as managed components from AppExchange partners!

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Announcing the Tableau Developer Portal

Existing Developer Program members can get to the new portal directly from developer.tableau.com, where they’ll log in with their TableauID. From there, DataDevs can easily find support and relevant tools to help them create extensions, web data connectors, embedded solutions, and other integrations.

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The Winter’22 release incorporates the ability to call invocable actions from Apex. Invocable actions are automated actions that can be invoked from different entry points such as the REST API, Flow, or Process Builder. They are one of the best tools in Salesforce to quickly get things done. From Winter’22, you will be able to invoke them in Apex. This adds one more tool to the Apex developer toolset, making it easier and quicker to implement certain types of automation, to reuse code, and it builds one more bridge between low-code and pro-code development.

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If you are new to live apps, they are new components developers can build to integrate Quip with third-party services and to add new types of content to Quip documents. Live apps are built as self-contained web apps using the React framework, plus our very own Live Apps API to sprinkle some Quip magic all over the new component.

In the past, publishing and releasing live apps was not the easiest process to follow. It was a manual process involving running commands on the developer’s machine, manually uploading a bundle to Quip Developer Console, and manually releasing the live app to Quip users at a company.

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Learn MOAR in Winter ’22 with Apex Enhancements

Let’s start by exploring the new valueOf() method in the Enum class. This method lets you convert a String to an Enum constant value. Before Winter’22, to get an Enum constant value from string, you had to iterate through all the values searching for a matching name. Rather than, for example, having to create a map linking string and Enum constants to do the lookup against, you can simply use Enum.valueOf().

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Winter ’22 release includes some features in Developer Preview mode. This means that the feature is pretty stable, but it may change slightly — you can use it at your own risk. One of the developer preview features is light DOM for Lightning Web Components OSS (tip: instead of using shadow DOM!). Activate light DOM to let tools like Google Analytics penetrate into the DOM of your components, as well as to let CSS cascading affect your component’s styling if needed. The ability to call Invocable Actions from Apex is also in Developer Preview, and it can only be used in scratch orgs for now

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We’re thrilled to share the latest enhancements to the Salesforce platform. But first, let’s take a quick look at the dates you should know about to make sure you’re ready for the Winter ’22 release.

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Dreamforce 2021 for Developers

Dreamforce 2021 is almost here! Join us September 21–23 for an all-digital experience on Salesforce+, our new, free streaming service. We’ve got an incredible lineup this year with more than 100 hours of live and on-demand programming. Expect to see exciting demos, episodes hosted by our experts, luminary speakers, and more.

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Trailhead, the free online learning platform from Salesforce, is the fun way to learn in-demand skills. While learning is its own reward, there’s always room for a little extra motivation. Trailhead Quests combine the challenge of learning new skills with the chance of winning sweet prizes.

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We’re thrilled to share the latest enhancements to the Salesforce platform. But first, let’s take a quick look at the dates you should know about to make sure you’re ready for the Winter ’22 release.

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Email and Calendar Integrations

Get up to speed on available products and find a solution that meets your needs. If you have Lightning Sync or Salesforce for Outlook, learn about availability and how to move to a next-generation product.

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When you’re composing custom web components, you need to understand how events bubble up through the DOM because that’s how children and parents communicate—props down, events up. When an event bubbles, it becomes part of your component’s API and every consumer along the event’s path must understand the event.

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Outbound messages are available as a core action in Flow Builder. Send a SOAP message from a record-triggered flow to a designated endpoint. For example, notify an external service when a high-priority case is created. Perhaps you used outbound message actions with workflow rules and approval processes. Now outbound message actions are available for record-triggered flows that run after the record is saved.

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Salesforce Enterprise Architect Pocket Guide

Welcome to Salesforce Architect Success Enterprise Architect Toolkit! This month when we launched, Salesforce Enterprise Architect Program, we focused on marketing our assets to the key audiences of our partners, employees, and customers. Once we did this, we continued to receive requests to have a toolkit that walks through each program and where individuals can go to learn and ultimately grow their career opportunities!

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Salesforce has maintained one of the strongest backward compatibility postures in the industry. For example, version 7.0 of the Salesforce SOAP API launched in 2006 — what were you up to 15 years ago? You couldn’t have been talking on an iPhone, tapping on an iPad, writing code in Python 3.0, running JavaScript on Node.js, or hailing an Uber, because none of those technologies existed back then!

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This week, we hosted the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free digital event for game developers, publishers, and advertisers to come together globally. Though we couldn’t meet in person, we’re grateful for the chance to share our latest solutions for developers to create immersive and memorable gaming experiences for players everywhere.

All keynotes and sessions from the summit are available on demand. Here are a few things we discussed during our keynote sessions:

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Google Pay integration patterns that drive conversions on Android

If you set Google Pay as a default payment option for ready-to-pay users, your users only need to click or tap twice to complete their transactions, so they enjoy a more-seamless payment experience and they’re less likely to abandon their carts. Our partners who implemented this pattern reported a significant increase in their success metrics. For example, at Gilt, 34% of total Google Pay checkouts were net-new Gilt member conversions and 57% of total Google Pay checkouts were reactivations of lapsed Gilt members.

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Salesforce has maintained one of the strongest backward compatibility postures in the industry. For example, version 7.0 of the Salesforce SOAP API launched in 2006 — what were you up to 15 years ago? You couldn’t have been talking on an iPhone, tapping on an iPad, writing code in Python 3.0, running JavaScript on Node.js, or hailing an Uber, because none of those technologies existed back then!

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A lot of people prefer to make big purchases like furniture in person. It seems easier to visualize it in their home if they can see it. But what if you could take that recliner from the showroom right to your customer’s living room?

Brands are using AR to make that leap. Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Threekit have partnered to create an app that allows you to scan a room and place it virtually in the space. This kind of customizable shopping experience is expected to drive consumer trends in the future.

“Consumers today expect an individualized experience that connects the product to their specific needs,” says Marc Uible, VP of Marketing at Threekit. “The kind of AR-enhanced offering that Threekit offers helps consumers make this connection and has helped drive sales growth.”

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MuleSoft and Slack embody the composable enterprise

Slack’s technology has played an integral role in keeping organizations agile during the pandemic by enabling them to organize their people and their work in this evolving digital-first and work-from-anywhere world.

This is why we can’t wait to bring Slack into the Salesforce portfolio so that collectively we can reimagine how teams work together to deliver incredible customer and employee experiences.

At MuleSoft, we’ve also been essential for organizations looking to digitally transform in this period of disruption. We help organizations deliver a composable enterprise, enabling them to connect all of their applications, devices, and data as composable building blocks that allow them to be significantly more agile and efficient.

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In banking, the majority of data movement is done over some type of messaging transport, as most banking transactions are asynchronous.

Most banking transactions are asynchronous because they are often complex, involve multiple parties, and take some time to execute — payments are an example of this. Payments will often be submitted over a Synchronous mechanism like a RESTful call (web. mobile), however, the execution of that payment may require the choreography of multiple participants each one taking a varied amount of time to complete.

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