Salesforce Communities

Initially Salesforce introduces many types of portals like partner portal, customer portal etc. Now these features are not available for new customers and Salesforce suggest to migrate to communities from existing portals because it is easy to implement and having more features.

Also all data access can be configured by Admin and even you can create different communities for your organization as per requirement as we normally do with WhatsApp groups or Facebook groups.

I have created presentation on Salesforce Communities and presented it in one of the Salesforce Meet up held in Pune, India.

Salesforce Communities from Sunil Kumar

Hope this will help in basic understanding of Salesforce Communities!!

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Important Things to Consider for Record Access while Designing Large Scale Applications

As we already know through Organization wide default, record access to different users in system can be controlled. Apart from OWD, user can get record access through role, being a part of public group with which record is shared, territories etc. In order to control access of records, Salesforce maintain record sharing data and recalculate the sharing when any changes happen to role, territory, public group etc. For end user, changing user's role is simple operation but at the back end, Salesforce has to perform all record sharing recalculation based on user's new role.

Lets discuss all this in details. First we will start with Database Architecture. Salesforce maintains 3 types of tables as mentioned below:

• Object Record Table

These are the tables which stores records of specific object and indicate which user or queue owns each record.

• Object Sharing Table

If OWD of any object is public read only or private, the Salesforce create share table for that object.This table store information about record access for all users which is shared by explicit grant (shared with user or group) or implicit grant (built in sharing like access to child opportunity, cases if you have access to account record).

• Group Maintenance Tables

This table stores list of users or groups that belong to each group indicating group membership. Suppose a record is shared with group, then Salesforce check group maintenance table to identify which all users inherit access to that record (either through role hierarchy, group membership or through territories).

So when Salesforce has to find out that if user has access to record, then it perform join between three tables to identify record access for user. If user is owner of record, then it will display that record. If not it will check object sharing table and group maintenance table to find users access to record.

Salesforce Role hierarchy, public groups and territories are closely connected with sharing rules and security features. Suppose an user owns more than 10,000 records and now admin just changed this role. Now salesforce need to remove access to all these records for all user which are having higher role than user's previous role and need to provide access to all user's in higher role than new user's new role. So Salesforce has to recalculate the record access and sometimes it may take more time.

In order to handle these scenarios, Salesforce provide few tools which can be used to avoid these issues caused by user realignment either through roles, territory or public groups:

• Parallel Sharing Rule Calculation

Whenever admin changes user's role or change group membership or create, edit or delete sharing rules, then recalculation for record access happens synchronously. So when any of these changes affects access right to large number of records, the recalculation job take longer time. If any Salesforce perform any activity at this time like patch release or upgrade, then recalculation jobs get killed. In this scenrio, consider parallel Sharing Rule calculation. This will split the job in multiple threads which will run asynchronously and if Salesforce perform any activity, these jobs will resume after salesforce activity.

Contact Salesforce in order to enable this feature.

• Deferred Sharing Maintenance

Suppose you have rebuild the role hierarchy and group membership, the sharing recalculation may take significant time. In this kind of scenarios, you can enable deferred sharing which will allow admins to switch off of sharing recalculation and perform all role and group membership changes and then switch on sharing calculation. After switching on sharing calculation, admin has to start recalculation of all sharing rules for accurate user access rights.

Remenber deferred sharing doesnot stop sharing recalculation due to implicit sharing.

Contact Salesforce in order to enable this feature.

• Granular locking

Whenever any change is performed to roles or group, Salesforce locks entire Group membership table to protect data integrity. This will make impossible to perform group membership changes. Consider a scenario in which your users are facing frequent record locking error and restrict their ability to manage manual and automatic update at same time or degrade the group maintenance updates, then enable Granular Locking feature.

If Granular locking feature is enabled then system will lock portion of records instead of locking entire Group maintenance table. This allow multiple update simultaneously if there is no hierarchical or other relationship between the roles and groups involved in the update.

You need to contact Salesforce to enable Granular locking feature.

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Login Flows to Display Important Messages to User After Login

Sometimes it is required to display some message to SFDC users when some maintenance or migration activity is getting performed in production. For example, during some major project release which may take many hours or many days for metadata and data migration, you want to display message to SFDC user saying "Maintenance is in progress and you may experience intermittent issues".

You might have seen these kind of intermediate screen informing about Salesforce maintenance window after logging into salesforce.

Login Flows allow administrators to display intermediate screen (Flow) once user is authenticated and after that user will be redirected to home page of salesforce.

You can create a flow using flow designer and associate it with Login flow. As you already know that flow can be used to collect some information from users or to display some message to end users. Using flow you can specify set of screen to capture data from user or navigate the user's to set of instructions.

Important points regarding Login Flows:

• The login flow screens are embedded within the standard Salesforce login page for uniform user experience.
• You need to associate Login flows to different profiles. So all user related to that profile will see flow screen after authentication.
• Login Flows can be applied to SFDC Orgs, communities and portals. 
• Login flow comes into picture whenever user login through UI either using username and password, delegated authentication, SAML single sign-on, and social sign-on through a third-party authentication provider

Now we will create a sample flow to display maintenance message to end users during some major project release. Below are steps which we need to follow:

Create a flow

• Navigate to Set Up--> Create-->Flow. Click on New Flow button. This will open Flow designer screen. Drag Screen Palette from left side and name it as "Maintenance Window Message".

• Now Click on "Add a Field" tab and double click on display text.

• Now click on "Field Settings" tab and click on display text. Give unique name as "MessageToDisplay". Specify the message which you want to display to end User and then click Ok.

• Mark screen as start element for you flow by clicking on green down arrow as shown below.

• Now Save flow by clicking on Save button and name flow as "Maintenance Window Flow".

• Now Close the Flow and Activate it. Click on Activate link. Remember only active flow will be available for login Flows.

Assign Login Flow to Profile

• Navigate to Set Up-->Security Controls-->Login Flows. Click on New Button. Specify name as "Maintenance Window Message" and select license and profile. Profile list depends on license selected by user.

• In this way you can create multiple entries for different profiles.

Now you login into Salesforce to test this. Once you specify your username and password, you will see below message screen.

Points to remember:

• You can just delete the login Flows records after maintenance window so that users will not see this message after login.
• You can not create more than 1 login flow record for a given profile. Suppose you want to assign different flow to same profile in login flow then you will get below error:

Hope this will help!!!

For more details on Login flow, please refer below URL:
Login Flows

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Custom Metadata Types and Custom Settings Implementation Tricks

Custom Settings

• Custom settings helps to create custom data set  and associate the data set to particular user, profile or for all users (org-wide). 
• There are 2 types of custom setting, List and Hierarchy
• Same set of data is available to all user if we define List custom setting.
• In Hierarchy custom setting, you can control data visibility based on logged in user, profile or org-wide. 
• In Hierarchy custom setting for logged in user, system first check user then profile and then org wide setting in order to return data from hierarchy custom setting.
• You can control the visibility of custom setting by specifying it as public or protected.
• If custom setting is marked as protected, the subscriber organization will not be able to access the custom setting. If it is marked as public, then subscriber org can also access it.
• Once you create custom setting, then you cannot change the type (List to hierarchy or vice versa).
• Custom setting data is available in application cache which increase performance. 
• You can access custom setting data using instance methods and can avoid SOQL queries to database.
• While migrating custom setting to another org, you need to migrate data for custom setting separately.
• Custom settings do not support relationship fields.
• Custom setting can be used by formula fields, validation rules, flows, Apex, and the SOAP API.
• You cannot access List custom setting in Validation rule. Only Hierarchy custom setting can be used.
• In order to use value from list custom setting in validation rule, create a field in object and populate list custom setting value in custom field through triggers and then refer it in validation rule. Validation rule fires after trigger execution.
• You can perform CUD (Create, Update, Delete) operation on custom setting in apex.
• Custom settings are not visible in test class without "SeeAllData" annotation.

Custom Metadata Types

• Custom metadata are like custom setting but records in custom metadata type considered as metadata
• You can migrate data present in custom metadata type to different org easily. 
• This helps to create app configuration data and include it in package. 
• Custom metadata types support Metadata Relationship. It is still in Beta.
• Metadata Relationship provides the ability to add relationships from your custom metadata to other things in your app, such as other custom metadata, custom or standard objects and fields, and static resources.
• You can't perform CUD (Create, Update, Delete) operation on custom metadata type in apex.
• You can also control the visibility of custom metadata type while adding it in package.
• Custom metadata type are visible in test class without "SeeAllData" annotation.

Custom metadata types are still in development phase and many new features will come in coming future.

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Refer Below Links for Salesforce Interview Questions

Validation Rules
Process Builder
Workflow & Approval Process
Reports & Dashboards
Data Management
Sharing & Security
Salesforce Objects & Fields

Onclick Javascript-AJAX Toolkit

When working with small amounts of data, use the AJAX Toolkit.

AJAX works best with relatively small amounts of data (up to 200 records, approximately six fields with 50 characters of data each). The larger the data set returned, the more time it will take to construct and deconstruct a SOAP message, and as the size of an individual record gets larger, the impact on performance becomes greater. Also, as more HTML nodes are created from the data, the potential for poor performance increases. Because browsers are not efficient, careful consideration needs to be given to browser memory management if you intend to display a large amount of data.

The following are examples of appropriate uses:

• Updating a single record.
• Modifying few fields of related child records.
• Perform one or more simple calculations and then update a record.

Here I will be sharing basic sample code for 3 scenarios mentioned above.

1. Updating a record

Support users can assign cases (assign to queue) to themselves by clicking on "Accept" button present in Case detail page. On click on "Accept" button, system will change the case ownerid to current logged in user. Below is sample code:

1. Updating child records or list of records

Notify Contacts of Account to update their Contact details. Create a checkbox field(contact_update_required__c) in Contact. Create a workflow rule which will send email to all contacts to update their contact details whenever checkbox field is true. Create a related list button for Contact object “Update Contact Details” and add it to Contact related list on Account page layout. Whenever this button is clicked, onclick javascript modify the checkbox field to true in all related contacts of Account.

1. Performing logic by calling apex method

There are few scenarios where you want to perform complex logic in apex class and want to execute that logic on click of button. For example, you want send notifications to attendees of event based on some logic. For this, you need to create global class and create webservice method and then call it from onclick javascript.

Others capabilities of AJAX  toolkit are:

• Performing synchronous and asynchronous calls.
• Query,create,edit,delete,undelete,merge and search records. 
• Convert lead,send email and initiate approval process.
• Use describe to get object and fields information.

Refer below URL for more reference on AJAX toolkit:

AJAX Toolkit Developer guide

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