Salesforce Developer Day To Day Activities

Salesforce is the most in-demand and one of the fastest growing skills which you should possess if you want to have a career in the same. The ubiquitous nature of the skill-set is helpful for every kind of professional like software developers, solutions architects, project managers, and even sales professionals. However, a career in Salesforce is possible if you have the requisite knowledge about the right resources which will be useful to you.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is the most successful Customer Relationship Management system which helps the companies to keep records about their customers, marketing and basically streamlines the sales process. As Salesforce is being built on an underlying technology called the Salesforce Platform, it is highly extensible. Businesses are using it for many needs like HR, Finance, IT, etc. It is thus a Platform-as-a-Service which takes care of the underlying infrastructure of your business.

As a developer, this is very promising as you get involved in the applications, data and will only be taking care of the coding without having to worry about any underlying servers like performance, networking, and even updates. Also, due to the Model-View-Controller paradigm which is followed by Salesforce, the development environment for the developers is highly sophisticated.

Things you should know as a Developer

Technologies used by Developers

• Language-oriented towards objects like Apex
• Database which has querying abilities
• Visualforce which is a web page markup language

Thus, developers who have experience in coding and is also familiar with various database concepts and other web page technologies will not have any issue in the transition to the Salesforce development platform.

Programmatic Options: These are available to you in Salesforce for developing your application.

MVC Architecture: MVC or Model-View-Controller architecture can be divided into the following parts.Model: It denotes the Salesforce Data Objects, relationships, and fields. It comprises of both the standard and other custom objects.View: This shows the presentation of the data, i.e. the user interface. It comprises the pages of Visualforce, components, tabs and page layouts. Controller: It forms the building block of the application logic.

Action in Salesforce: It is important for you to know how the Salesforce application works. The user generally gives information to the Salesforce application via the Visualforce. This information is then taken to the logic layer wherein it is written in Apex. Data is then either put in or removed from the database based on the information. Salesforce training also gives you the option of making use of web services for directly accessing the application logic. As a developer, you may either opt for a declarative or a programmatic option for building the user-interface.

• Declarative Approach: In this, you make use of page layouts, record types for building the user interface. Also, for building the business logic layer, you can make use of the options like workflow, validation rules, and even the approval processes. For accessing the data model, in the declarative way you can use objects, relationships, and fields.
• Programmatic Approach: In this, you make use of the Visualforce pages and components. One can try using this is the declarative approach does not function. In case of building the logic layer under a programmatic approach, you may use the triggers, controllers and even the classes. While accessing the data model, in this case, you can use metadata, API, REST API, and even bulk API.

Visualforce: As a developer in Salesforce, it is essential for you to know about how to develop the user interface and also write application logic. In Salesforce this can be done using the Visualforce. Latter is a framework for user-interface for Forcedotcom. It is used for both designing and building user-interfaces for the Salesforce applications just like we use JavaScript Angular-JS framework for building the user-interfaces for your websites.  It has two main components or elements.

Visualforce Markup: It includes the visualforce tags, HTML, JavaScript or even other web-enabled code.Visualforce Controller: This includes the instructions which define the process of what happens when a user is interacting with a component. This is written using the Apex which is a programming language.

Visualforce can be used every time where you need to build some custom pages like in the following instances.

• Building Email templates.
• Development of mobile user-interface.
• Generation of PDF’s of the data already stored in Salesforce.
• Embedding of Standard Page Layouts.
• Overriding a standard page of Salesforce.
• Development of custom tabs for your application.

Apex: After you have finished the development of the user interface, you should know about the ways to put custom logic to your application. The Apex programming language lets you write controller code and even add custom logic to your application. It is basically an object-oriented language of programming which lets you execution flow and also transaction control statements on the Force.com platform. It is easy for you to learn Apex if you have previous experience of using the Java Programming language. The syntax of Apex is 70% similar to that of Java. Here are a few instances where Apex can be used:

1. For the addition of web and other email services to your application
2. To perform complicated business processes
3. For the addition of complex validation instructions to your application
4. In case if you have to add custom logic on various operations like saving a record.

Triggers: It is a must for every Salesforce developer to know about the Salesforce triggers which are basically stored programs which get activated when you perform various actions both before or after making suitable changes to the Salesforce records. These are of two broad types:

• Before Trigger: These are used for updating or validating records before they are saved.
• After Trigger: These are used for accessing field values which are set by the system to and to affect changes to other records.

Time-Zones: It is important for a developer to know about Time-Zones which are usually of two types: Region-based and Offset-based. When the time zones vary from the GMT based on the region they fall in the regional classification while when they represent an offset from the GMT, they stand for the offset classification. In Salesforce, as a developer, it is better to make use of the offset time-zone as it removes the ambiguity which is generally associated with the regional time-zones.

Conclusion

Thus, there are many facts and facets which you neeSalesforce Developer to know as a Salesforce Developer. All these aspects are easily learned during the certification and training process. It is important that you invest your time wisely and get the right training for proper knowledge about all aspects of Salesforce.