Improve Your Working Experience with Salesforce Developer Experience(DX)

For Salesforce professionals, Salesforce DX is an enthralling release. It’s a shift in how programmers build and distribute programs for the system. With this new method, a better and more up-to-date development flow has been made available to Salesforce Developers, which comes with supporting tools. This tool is designed to increase efficiency and competence in the salesforce application cloud by facilitating more effective management and communication among team members. Deployment has traditionally been a pain point in Salesforce development. Still, with Salesforce DX, you can access the most effective and cutting-edge tools from the first stages of development to the final stages of product release. It helps businesses take advantage of digital market opportunities and speed up developing and deploying high-quality apps. Access the most recent information regarding the Salesforce Developer Experience in this blog. 

What is Salesforce Dx(Developer Experience)? 

Salesforce Developer Experience (DX) is a comprehensive way to manage and build apps on the salesforce lightning platform throughout their entire lifecycle. It brings together the best parts of the Lightning Platform to allow source-driven development, integrated teamwork, and new levels of agility for building custom apps on Salesforce. This means that Salesforce DX has a centralized source control system to help teams with more than one developer keep the source of truth from changing.

The source of truth is a place where all team members can find configurations and the main code repository for building an application. This makes it less likely that code will be overwritten and lets features are tested in separate environments that won’t affect the whole product.

Salesforce DX also has packages that can be unlocked, and these packages have more features that make managing org changes easier. Integrating DevOps tools into the environment makes it work better for your Salesforce development pipeline.

Highlights of Salesforce DX include

Your tools are done your way. With Salesforce DX, you use the tools you’re already familiar with as a developer.

• The ability to use best practices when making software. Source code and metadata are kept outside the org, making it easier for a team to develop Salesforce apps. Instead of the org, the source of truth is your version control system.
• Using your Salesforce org for development, continuous integration, and delivery is much easier when you have a powerful command-line interface (CLI).
• You can build development and automated environments with scratch orgs that are flexible and easy to change. Building your apps and packages is easier with this new type of org.
• You can use any IDE or text editor with the CLI and externalized source.
• You can speed up app development with Salesforce Extensions for VS Code. These tools have features for working with scratch orgs, Salesforce Apex, Lightning components, and Visualforce.

What are the Benefits of Salesforce DX?  

This aids effective teamwork and growth.

•  A more nimble and effective release cycle process is the result.
• Developers can use their preferred coding environments to command line interfaces (CLIs), text editors (VIMs, Sublime Text, Atom, etc.), etc.
• Allows for your code to be continuously tested and integrated with ease.
• Needs a local development environment so programmers can gain practical experience with DX.

What are the Cons of Salesforce DX? 

• The platform may contain bugs until some functionalities are implemented.
• System administrators may find troubleshooting challenging because of the large number of line commands and specific directions that are typically required.
• Developers face a steep learning curve as they become accustomed to the bespoke platform.

Salesforce DX Tools and Features 

Not every DX feature will be necessary for every team, and different team members will use DX tools in ways that make sense to them.

A. the Salesforce Cli 

The Ant-based Force.com migration tool was replaced by the Salesforce command-line interface (CLI). It has all of the functionality of Ant plus the ability to push and pull metadata to and from orgs, convert metadata to SFDX format, and manage other DX features. If you’re a developer, the Salesforce CLI will put the power of DX at your fingertips.

B. Integrated Development Environment (ide)

Salesforce also released Visual Studio Code extensions that make the lightweight, extensible code editor an excellent IDE for working with DX, effectively replacing the Eclipse-based Force.com IDE, which has since been retired. Salesforce continues to improve its IDE tooling, with plans to release Code Builder, a web-based development environment, this year.

C. Scratch Orgs

Scratch orgs are fully customizable, source-driven development environments that can be used to simulate Salesforce orgs. These are suitable for automated testing as well as application development.

D. Dev Hub

Dev Hub is extremely useful for creating or managing temporary environments, also known as Scratch orgs. By enabling Dev Hub functionality in your production org, you can easily create scratch orgs. There are two toggles under Setup > Dev Hub, and the first enables Dev Hub functionality, while the second allows for developer-controlled packaging.

E. Source-Driven Development

Through modern technologies such as Git, version control systems enable multi-developer teams to shift the source of truth and collaborate.

F. Managed Packages

Because there is no separation of concerns, packaging your metadata avoids having an unstructured org, which can be more challenging to manage and modify. Salesforce already allowed teams to package metadata into logical units that could be installed in orgs prior to DX. Still, DX introduced second-generation packaging (2GP) with several improvements over 1GP.

The most significant change is that 2GP makes version control, rather than a packaging organization, the source of truth for package metadata. Unlocked packages are another name for these packages. If your team decides to package, use unlocked packages to ensure a best-practice DevOps process with version control.

G. a New Metadata Format for Salesforce Dx

Salesforce DX also introduced a new metadata format. When you switch to DX format, large, complicated metadata types like custom objects and translations are broken down into more manageable subcomponents. This change makes working with files in your IDE much more manageable for developers. The new metadata format also benefits the entire team by reducing the likelihood of merge conflicts. When developers and administrators change the duplicate files, they frequently encounter merge conflicts that Git cannot resolve. By separating the metadata into smaller, separate files, teammates are more likely to work in different files and have fewer merge conflicts to resolve.

H. Salesforce’s Dependency Api

Among the enhancements to Salesforce’s APIs, the Dependency API is yet another DX feature that assists teams in understanding and managing the complexities of orgs with numerous dependencies between metadata. The Dependency API is still in beta, but it can be used to determine which components reference which others and vice versa.

How to Set up Your Salesforce Dx Environment Perfectly?

• Setup Salesforce DX Environment
• Setup VS Code Environment
• Setup Salesforce DX Experience with VS Code
• Create Salesforce DX Project Via Command Palette
• Authorize Your Non-DevHub Org via the Command Palette
• Create a Lightning Web Component via Command Palette
• Deploying the Component to Org

Workflow of Using Salesforce Dx 

A Salesforce DX Workflow example

There isn’t a single workflow that works for every team, but the following example shows how the feature branch model is usually used. The deployments could be done using the CLI, and a toolchain of open-source software could automate the process. Or, one DevOps solution can handle the whole process.

• Create a feature branch from the main component of your Git repository before starting a new piece of work.
• Use a definition file in your Git repository to create a scratch org.
• Changes can be made in the scratch org or IDE, and the scratch org and the branch will stay in sync.
• Once the work is ready to be looked over, make a pull request and give it to a teammate.
• After the review and any requested changes, merge the branch into the main line. Then, get rid of the branch.
• The piece of work is ready for either UAT or QA! Your testing environments can be set up automatically by a continuous integration job.
• Release to Production when testing is done. 

Conclusion 

We have finished investigating Salesforce DX’s capabilities. When it comes to Salesforce DX, you have a lot of freedom to experiment with the many different tools and capabilities at your disposal without spending a dime. SFDX metadata format and constantly increasing tools for Salesforce developers have simplified development and DevOps; however, not every team decides to employ scratch orgs or second-generation packaging. Salesforce developers can benefit greatly from its many new and beneficial features. Salesforce’s DX gives admins and developers more leeway in their collaboration. DX will grow and develop new and exciting features in the following months or years.